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Chris McCombs: … easily spent six figures on info products and coaching and mastermind groups in the last three or four years, easily. I mean I have one program I’m involved in and it costs me 10 grand a year. I have coaches that cost me 500 bucks an hour. I buy $2000 to $3000 courses on sometimes a damn near weekly basis. OK?
There’s always this big box of shit landing at my front door from the UPS driver and my wife always gives me the look. You know, what is he buying now? But what’s cool is, is that it’s a return on investment. I know that most personal trainers and most of my competition are not willing to go invest at this stuff. They actually look at this stuff as a loss, like as an expense, like wow, there’s no way I will spend $2000 in some course like that. I don’t look at it like that. I know if I spent $2000 in that course and that course gets me two clients, right? That I know an average client to me is worth 2500 bucks. So if I get two clients, I just made $3000 because I get 5000 for two clients and I paid 2000 for the course.
Just if I only get two clients from what I learned from that course, I just made $3000 but typically a lot of courses can get me a hell of a lot more business in that and a lot of times in the entire course, it might just be one or two things that I learned that really make me a ton of money. I can look back in almost every single course I bought and then spent so much money on, that I learned this one thing from that course and this thing from that course and a lot of this stuff will pay itself off like 100 times over. I mean it’s really – it’s crazy and it’s very comforting for me to know that I’m always spending this kind of money on this stuff and that a lot of my competition isn’t.
I mean at first now, I even like maxed out credit cards and was willing to like go into debt to learn this stuff because I knew the payoff was huge. There is a key to it though. Not only do you have to buy this stuff, you also have to take the [0:02:07] [Indiscernible] bust in. Go through the course. Spend an hour or two a day learning this shit and then you have to go apply it because it’s not going to do you any good sitting there in your closet.
If you’ve gone to a membership site, it’s not going to do you any good if you don’t go in that thing on a weekly basis and go through the content. So I definitely say invest in info products. That’s one of my biggest secrets, man. Info products, mastermind groups, coaching, networking and invest in all of that stuff. Look at it as an investment. Dig into the content. Actually use the content. Put time aside every single day to go through this stuff and I can tell you how I get through so much stuff if you want. It’s really pretty simple and then apply what you learn.
Michael Duivis: Yes, that’s good advice. Me, myself, I’m doing that right now. I’m buying a whole lot of stuff and some of my friends, they think that if they buy this stuff, it’s like a magic bullet but there’s no such thing as something for nothing.
I’m actually a member of your Market Annihilator Program and well, for those of our listeners that don’t know what that is, it’s a whole lot of instructions on how to get your website to rank high in Google, how to market your website online. And there’s a lot of work involved and I just want to cover kind of a different subject. The one thing that I’m reading a lot about right now is for personal trainers to outsource, to outsource a lot of stuff concerning their website or the stuff that doesn’t make them any money but still needs to be done.
Now this is kind of like a personal question too. Like if you really have no money to outsource let’s say article writing or you want to optimize pages for certain cities, what would you recommend, I mean, for that trainer?
Chris McCombs: Well, what you want is the trainer needs to learn, has to learn what has got to get done. So you can’t outsource something if you don’t know what needs to be done, if you don’t know how to have an optimized article for the search engines or how to get links for the search engines or how to have blog posts written for you or articles written for you or any of this kind of stuff that can get very tedious. If you don’t know how it’s going to get done, you can’t just give it to someone and say, “Here, do this,” because 99 percent chance they’re going to do a horrible job and you’re not going to be happy with what they do.
So the key is first of all, you have to learn what has got to get done. Then what I would do is create step-by-step systems for implementing that to your business. So if you learned how to build links to your site, right? Building the proper links is one of the most important things to get high in the search engines or actually all these other sites linking to your sites and what their sites are about and what their links say about your site and what pages they link to on your site. I mean this stuff is super important but you can’t just tell someone, “Hey, go get me some links.” You actually have to learn how to do it yourself and then create – what I would do is create a little video, a step-by-step how to do it. If you have a Mac, I would go by ScreenFlow. If you have a PC, I would go by Camtasia. I would make step-by-step screen captured videos showing someone exactly how to do what you need to get done.
Then if you’re a personal trainer or boot camp instructor or whatever, I would go find – if you don’t have enough money where you can afford to pay someone to do this, I would barter this stuff out. In my business typically, we have four or five barter clients.
There were times where I’ve had 8 or 10. One of my good buddies Zach Hunt, I think he has like 12 or 13 barter clients. He has one barter client who all she does is goes and finds more barter clients for him. And basically if you train groups of people, it’s a pain in the ass [0:05:57] [Indiscernible] training. But if you train groups of people like some of my private training, small groups or if you do boot camps, OK, or let’s say you do small groups and you want them to train a lot of time, right?
If you have five people paying you, what’s the hurt if you have one person not paying you but she’s out getting you links or she’s out writing you articles? OK? And you can a lot of times find these guys on Craigslist under the barter section. It’s a great way to find them and like I said, Zach, he actually has one girl who her whole job is to post ads on the barter section of Craigslist and to set appointments with him with people who would barter and can manage all that barter stuff and that’s a girl that he barters with. OK?
So I would barter it out. Now, well one, you deal with people on Craigslist. There’s a super high flake factor and also when you’re dealing with people on a barter basis, there’s also a super high flake factor. So my experience has been about only like one in five people are going to work out really well. That’s why the videos are handy so you’re not wasting your time training the people on what to do. You’re not sitting down and showing them for two hours.
You just hand them a video and go, “Hey, do exactly what that video says.” And that makes a lot easier to manage your time but if over the course of six months, you go through 50 people, you’re going to end up finding those 10 good ones who are really going to work for you to get those 10 tasks done and if you train groups or boot camps, 10 people, that’s awesome. And hey, those 10 guys might even get you some referrals too to help you bring in some paying clients.
So I think that that’s one key with it and then do remember you get what you inspect, not what you expect. So if you tell someone to do something, I would set a day a month, a day a week, a certain time on a regular basis for you to go in there and you just kind of look over what has been done because my experience has been even the really good people are going to screw up 20 percent of your stuff. But you have to go on a regular basis and check it out and make sure it’s done right because otherwise, it’s going to be just a giant mess.
So you got to keep an eye on it and I would systematically work that into your schedule. So that’s a big key on outsourcing. I mean unless you want a business – like I don’t want to be a 75-year-old personal trainer. I mean yes, I would be working out when I’m 75 and maybe train a couple of people if I feel like it but I don’t want to have to. I don’t want to be like some old dude who has to get up at 4:45 in the morning because my whole business relies upon me. My whole business relies upon me showing up at that gym. OK? That would suck.
So the key is to get a business that’s based on systems and there’s a real simple formula for this. Every entrepreneur who wants to own a business – so if you own a boot camp or a personal training business, you wear three hats. OK? This is from Michael Gerber, the book The E-Myth. You wear three hats.
You wear the technician’s hat which would basically be doing the personal training. It would be like signing the person up in a lot of instances. It might be writing up their workouts, writing up their nutrition program.
You also wear the management hat which is scheduling the workouts, making sure they get billed, making sure you get paid, customer service, administrative stuff.
And then you also wear the entrepreneur’s hat which is coming up with the marketing strategies and campaigns, the overall vision of the company, the systems and strategies to get everything done and most personal trainers spend all of their time in the technician’s hat and the management hat running around, doing a lot of the busy work and they don’t spend any time with the entrepreneur’s hat on and for me, I personally like to spend as damn near close to 100 percent of my time with the entrepreneur’s …
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