There are a few go-to sayings people like to throw around when enthusiastically discussing business growth.
I really like this one by Martin Luther King, Jr. Not only is it elegant, but it reflects a rapidly increasing number of real life stories in which online coaches and fitness pros are learning to scale their business to 6 figures+ in just months:
“If you can’t fly then run. If you can’t run then walk. If you can’t walk then crawl. Whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
So what really separates this new era of super-successful online coaching and fitness movers and shakers from those struggling to grow their business or just giving up?
I would argue there are always four things you can do to build forward momentum. I call them the 4 Golden Rules of Digital Business Growth and they are absolutely crucial for quickly growing an online coaching or fitness businesses like yours.
Follow all four to the letter and you’ll very likely find yourself rapidly scaling to six figures, especially if you’ve identified a real, in-demand niche or specialization within our industry, through which to genuinely serve and improve the lives of others.
The First Golden Rule: Mentorship
As an online coach and fitness pro, you spend the majority of your time trying to impart knowledge to others. You teach, recommend, and motivate. You advise, train, and inform. You nudge nurture, and enlighten.
Let me ask you – when do you learn?
Sure, we learn lessons from our clients all the time. Often they’re lessons that will help your next clients do even better as well. Sometimes they’re quiet yet powerful life lessons that sneak up on us.
Maybe we even take a few webinars from time to time.
But, when do you really set aside time to actively learn about yourself and how to really grow your business?
I’m not talking about reading motivational quotes on the Forbes landing page or popular blog posts that leave out the most critical how-to digital marketing steps and strategies. I’m talking about actively asking questions, finding answers, and implementing that handful of golden solutions that are proven to build 6 figure+ results? And how can you if you don’t:
Find Your Mentor
We already know learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We have to reach outside of ourselves and our business on a regular basis to get answers to questions, both big and small. We even need help finding the right questions to ask.
For example, is your business target market even real? Do you need to find a niche that’s actually marketable as a business-building starting point?
Do your research carefully in this first critical step. Find one person that already has the exact, demonstrated, replicable online business success you want and build a relationship. Someone who is a top 10 results-driven leader, operating directly with your target market.
If you’re lucky enough to know someone of the caliber we’re discussing here, It’s OK to ask if they’ll take you on as an understudy. They may not have time for hand-holding, but as long as they have the time to answer questions and provide direction or ideas, you have a mentor.
A greatly underappreciated yet simple fact of life here is that most of the time, getting an industry leader to mentor you in those proven, easy to replicate and implement business building strategies, and to tap into powerful pre-existing resources and networks costs money. Yet that’s exactly what the majority of those who are now dominating the industry are doing!
For many, their serious online business success will boil down to making the decision to pay for a high-value mentoring relationship or not.
If nobody comes to mind, or even if a few names bubble to the surface, I’m not one to give direction without being specific.
So allow me to suggest that you consider AJ Mihrzad. He specializes in building thriving online coaching and fitness businesses fast. More importantly, he has case studies from his own business, testimonials, and a growing list of clients in the online coaching and fitness world who have successfully scaled to six figures and beyond using his core business development strategies.
He’s worked with several of the digital marketing world’s most sought after mentors and digital business development coaches. So when you work with him you’re literally getting a distillation and refinement of the best of the best online business building strategies in existence today.
He’s a true leader in the new generation of online coaching and digital fitness marketing professionals. And you are so in luck!
AJ just partnered with the Spencer Institute to launch a first of its kind online certification, specially designed for coaches and fitness pros. He provides a step-by-step overview of his complete rapid online business development framework!
You will not believe how ridiculously affordable we’ve made it for you to urn this cutting edge digital coaching credential! Check it out here: Certified Online Coaching Program
Also visit AJ’s: The Online SuperCoach Podcast. It’s built specifically for online coaches and fitness pros. It’s free and you’ll learn some of the latest business-growth tips, tools, strategies and tactics from leading figures in the industry including may of his own clients, mentors and partners.
Commit to Learning Mode: Invest Time
We give advice and teach others so often, it can be easy to fall into the rut of thinking we always have to have the answers.
But high level digital marketing success is like learning drive a car. A qualified teacher is essential; we don’t know everything starting out and it takes a 100% commitment mindset to our learning to find the momentum we need. The mentorship golden rule isn’t about taking a passive approach. Set time aside in your schedule and protect that time. Make it one of your MITs!
Commit to ‘Leaning’ Mode: Invest in Yourself & Your Mentor
Mentorship isn’t just about finding someone from which to learn. If that were the case, everyone with a college degree or on-the-job training would be a massive six-figure success.. We’ve invested the time to learn.
Now invest in your mentor by trusting them and lean on them for their wisdom. Identify the gaps in your knowledge base and ask for resources.
Arrange regular one-on-one time and let your mentor coach you. If that isn’t possible, go ahead and attend conferences or other live trainings where you can engage, ask live questions, and benefit from the specific advice you need from your mentor.
The Second Golden Rule: Eliminate
As an entrepreneur, we need to be able to think big. We are the visionary of our future. If we don’t have time to think big or to act on our big dreams, they won’t happen. That means elimination is a golden rule to success.
Eliminate any activity in your personal and professional life that is unnecessary. It may seem like something that is simple to say but difficult to implement. When you understand how to eliminate, you’ll find yourself rapidly gaining momentum toward that six-figure goal.
Identify the What
Identifying what can be eliminated is half the battle. Some of our least efficient processes and tasks are habits. That means they are easily invisible to us.
Do you find you’re working with clients who drain and underpay you rather than inspire and motivate you? Are there mundane tasks like building your social media accounts and email lists (even yard maintenance or house cleaning) that can be outsourced to make room for your MITs (your most important tasks)? Are there tasks you’re just not skilled in like sales that can be outsourced on a pure commission basis?
As you go through your day, identify inefficiencies and correct them. Beyond inefficiency, how can you address complexity in your life.
Do you need to better manage procrastination? How can you reduce unneeded complexity so you can prioritize and single-task in your zone of genius? Gordon Treadstone has a great definition of complexity and the different types that we’re borrowing from here.
Identify the How
It doesn’t all have to be done at once. Part of the elimination process is to keep things simple, so you don’t want to overwhelm yourself with a reduction project. Take a clean simple approach.
Don’t hack away at the fat in your daily schedule. Instead, become a surgeon. Be ethical, caring, thoughtful, and precise in your incision so you slice through redundancy and rid yourself of inefficiencies.
Eliminating complexity and ridding yourself of inefficient tasks and habits will open your eyes to a new way to evaluate your time and your usefulness. Whatever you can’t eliminate becomes an option for automation.
The Third Golden Rule: Automate
You have removed complexity and simplified as much of your life as possible. You’ve outsourced mundane time wasters so you can focus on your MITs.
What still remains is most likely a busy set of tasks and projects, limited by the number of hours in the day.
A major rule of scaling is to get more done in less time and to do so on a continuously growing, even exponential rate. You set reminders in your calendar, right? That’s a simple form of automation. We’re trying to eliminate and automate anything that keeps you from tapping into the creativity, passion, expertise, and guidance you have to offer.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What else can you automate?
- Lead generation? Email campaigns? Client management? What CSR system do you have in place and how can it be optimized?
- What about your pitches for your products and services? Do you have an online process that will effectively turn your leads into clients so that you can step in when your personalized touch is actually needed?
- Are you outsourcing your online sales process on a commission only basis?
- What system or systems can be put in place that will automate high-value tasks you don’t actually need to be present for like social media posting?
- Can your best advice and top tips be added to your own pre-packaged e-learning materials, podcasts or webinars? If so, this will help you serve many more people, with a single time investment.
What’s the single most powerful way to identify the highest value tasks to automate and tools and tactics for getting those tasks automated? You got it! Ask your Mentor!
Another, way to identify automation-ready tasks is to determine whether there are applications and tools that can do it for you. Another is to check for any tasks that you have to replicate often. If it isn’t tied to your creative contribution – something that absolutely has to come directly from you, then it can be automated.
For example, do you know there are 3 Top Twitter Tools (all with free versions by the way) you can use to build a huge niche targeted Twitter tribe in just a few months!
This doesn’t mean you are suddenly too big to take on small tasks. This means you have a role to play and a specific skillset that needs to be addressed and utilized.
As AJ says, you need to focus on working with your “super-powers” as much as possible.
Tasks that aren’t supporting forward momentum and your specific role as expert, leader and visionary, can probably be handed over to internal systems.
The Fourth Golden Rule: Delegation
There’s no way around it. You need to build an effective team you can trust, then delegate to them. Anything that can’t be eliminated or automated gets delegated. Period.
Sometimes people get lost in the scaling project and their efforts backfire. For example, saving money often seems like a great idea so we can invest it in automation. This makes sense if you are replacing a receptionist with a landing page.
Yet if you eliminate administration and spread basic operational tasks to people who are qualified to do more, you’re missing the point.
You may save money by eliminating the admin, but you’re over-tasking your talent pool with administrative tasks. And of course this is where hiring a super affordable rock-star overseas virtual assistant comes in!
Do What You Do Best
A great exercise is to write your job description. Don’t just write “Chief Visionary Officer and Star Online Fitness Coach” as your title and then list what you already do.
Instead, write out the job description as it should be. List tasks that are specific to you that no one else can do.
Organize them into an outline and rewrite your job description until you have something that resembles what your chief responsibilities will be in one year or less. Anything you find you are still having to do yourself, but that isn’t on your job description, can be delegated.
If you don’t have someone on your team to delegate tasks to, then you’ve identified a gap in your dream-team. Find the right experts, specialists, and support personnel to take over until you are left with a filtered set of responsibilities that leaves you to focus on only doing what you do best. Everyone else can do the rest.
Remember the Passion
Delegation is a form of elimination and while you want to be quick, precise and moving toward the realization of real business growth targets, don’t forget the passion all this is rooted in.
You are an online coach or fitness pro and you do this because you are passionate about helping other human beings become healthier, happier and more successful in life. You are good at helping people.
When you create your team, make sure they have, or you instill in them, the same passion for your mission.
They serve a purpose by taking on the tasks you need to be free of, but they have value beyond that. They are the inner circle of your tribe. Hold them up and help them grow as you help yourself by participating in the golden rule process.
Ultimately, the golden rules are cyclical. You’ll repeat these steps throughout the years and at a much larger scale, you’ll want the peace of mind that comes with knowing you began with a strong foundation of passionate brand ambassadors through the exercise of their own super-powers.
The four golden rules are timeless and crucial for online coaches and fitness businesses.
Mentorship means learning, leaning, and yes, investing in the growth of yourself and your business through finding and working with your qualified mentor (someone who works with easily transferable, results driven systems, processes and business growth wisdom).
Elimination is an efficiency and detoxification process everyone needs to evaluate for a successful business, but it becomes critical when scalability is being applied.
Automation was the key to success during the industrial revolution and it continues to be a white whale for businesses of all kinds that don’t evaluate and implement with careful consideration.
And remember “The bigger the dream, the bigger the team”! Delegation is the royal road to freeing up your time to really focusing your super-powers so you can work within your “zone of genius”!
Letting go and trusting qualified team members to help realize your true business vision can be as difficult as it is an absolutely critical foundation of rapid 6 figure online business scaling.
Implementing these golden rules is a lesson of its own.
Through this golden learning process you’ll find letting go of mundane, time consuming task ownership, means fully discovering and unleashing the full potential of your core super powers as an online coaching or fitness expert.
Welcome to the heart of your mission! The spark that led you to this career. The real you that is now ready for rapid upward, scaling and the successful six-figure+ business you deserve!
Super-Bonus Tip: Join My Private Facebook Group Right Now so I Can Give You Free World Class Business Development and Digital Marketing Coaching and Mentoring! Let Me Share My Knowledge and Experience with you to Help Bring Your Fitness or Life Coaching Business to The Next Level!
