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It’s been a minute since I have emailed you. I enjoy reading your emails and tips/comments that you send out in your emails. You make valid points. Something I told the XYZ man a while back, all the marketing info that is peddled at all the summits you can get at your local library and didn’t like my OPINION with regard to college and me being a guy with an MBA and taught college marketing, business, as well as recruited, I have come to realize a couple things over the years:
1) It really comes down to satisfying the “want” or the “need” of a potential client when you get them as a lead. The psyche is a funny thing, because everyone is different and what motivates that person to workout, get in shape, lose weight, etc… is not the same for the other. They are all different and “why” they are doing it, will always come back to something they “want” or something they “need”. Our job as fitness professionals selling a product or services is to find it and figure out how to get that out of them, while helping them through their excuses like not enough money, not enough time, etc….
2) A while back, Dr. Michael Porter, from Harvard University, created one of his books on Strategic Management. He has written a few books, but one term during my MBA program that reigned supreme when learning about this guy from his Diamond Porter was the term “SCA” or Sustainable Competitive Advantage. Every MBA student or person in business should have heard of this.
You see everyday in marketing and advertising campaigns from the Proctor & Gamble products to your Internet companies like Verizon try to create that SCA.
As fitness professionals, when we try and be the BEST at what we do in our target market or area, we want to try and create an SCA. You can do this utilizing the Marketing Mix or the 4 Marketing P’s (Product, Price, Place, or Promotion) strategies and once you have created your niche, formulated your strategy, executed your strategy, you always, always to a control or follow-up, similiar to the military when we would do after action reviews on a mission. What we did good, bad, and how we could improve.
This last phase or the Control Phase of the Strategic Marketing Process is where a fitness professional wants to create the SCA based on their evaulation of how they are doing or have done say in the last quarter or last year of business.
Maybe you look at areas of the business, compare it to your competition, and formulate and implement a new strategy to give you that long term market share and advantage, thus called the SCA which in essence is you out shining your competition for the long haul 3, 5, 10, etc… years down the road.
Figuring out what you do BEST is only half the battle, the other half is figuring out what you do that the competition or nobody else does or offers in your business is what will give you that SCA.
You and I know we can’t be ALL things to ALL people. If I do a REAL ARMY bootcamp and I want focus on current military members or folks joining the military and nobody else does that, then there is my niche and I make sure I create a SCA so my competition can’t out shine me or try a do what I do.
Very similar to your recent email on being the BEST and how do you handle clients that leave you. Maybe your camp is not for them and that’s OK….Sam’s Kick Ass Boot Camp or facility might not be their cup of tea.
We as fitness professionals have to be OK that we may not reach EVERY client and it’s not our fault if they leave, but it is our fault if we don’t do everything in our power to be the most professional, positive, intense, and unique business we can for those people that DO WANT or NEED our services.
In closing, my opinion is just that. I realize as a retired military guy, I don’t need all the money in the world and I don’t need to grow to some 6 or 7-figure fitness guru to do what I love and use the K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle with my life. All I am saying is, if folks in our industry want to really succeed, they not only have to figure out their clients NEEDS or WANTS, but they have to know their own NEEDS and WANTS and implement the strategies that give them that SCA so they can be the go to guy/gal in their target market offering a service or product that is UNIQUE to the competition and lets them sustain it for the long haul, always evaluating, tweaking, and improving their product or service to keep folks coming back for more.
~ Tom
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