Kyle's Blog

Daily Articles From Kyle Wood

Archives for December 2020

30 Days

Daily ·

Today is the 30th day in a row that I’ve posted to this blog.

It’s been part of a challenge I set myself to do two things:

  • Write everyday as the first thing I do when I get up in the morning. Having a child who wakes at 6am, I didn’t think I could do this. But getting up a little earlier so I can have just 15 minutes to write has worked.
  • To show both my good writing and my bad writing because you never really know which is which until you hit publish.

I won’t lie. Some days I feel like I’ve phoned it in with the posts. Some have literally been an idea in 3 sentences that I’ve hastily written in the evening so I could stick to the challenge.

On other days though I’ve felt really proud of what I’ve written. And I guess that’s the point. The point is that to write your best stuff, you also have to write your worst and the point is to continue showing up everyday.

For the next 30 days I’m going to try switching it up a little. I’m going to keep writing everyday but I’m going to try spending a few days on one longer article.

I’m curious to see if I’ll enjoy that more. I’m also curious if I’ll find it harder to keep the daily writing habit up without the pressure of needing to publish and show my work everyday. That has been a really good motivator.

You can view all of the posts in the archive. Many thanks to Seth Godin for writing The Practice and inspiring me to do this.

Adding value

Daily ·

A quick way to measure the quality of something you post online is to ask yourself,

‘Will this add value to even just one person’s life?’

If the answer is yes then go ahead and do it.

Too expensive

Daily ·

When someone says you’re too expensive, what they’re really saying is:

  • I’m not willing to pay that much to have my problem solved.
  • I don’t understand how this will fix my problem.
  • I don’t believe that this will fix my problem.
  • I’m not ready to have my problem solved.
  • I’m overwhelmed and need a way out.

Importantly, as long as someone else says ‘Yes’, you’re not too expensive. So stick to your pricing guns.

Birthday #33

Daily ·

Today is my birthday. I’m 33.

At this point in my life I’m mainly a dad, a husband, a writer, a maker of things, a mentor and a friend. I’ll circle back in a few weeks for my usual review of the year with much more detail.

For those of you who are also group fitness trainers, you can use the code BIRTHDAY33 to get 33% off any of my ebooks and courses.

You can also use the same code (BIRTHDAY33) to get 33% for life off of your BootCraft subscription. That code will work for new members and can also be added if you already have a subscription.

Both codes will be valid until the end of the week (Dec 13th, 2020)

Choosing your products and services

Daily ·

A crucial part of your new business is always going to be how you will make money. One of the best ways to do that is to help people make a change that they are wanting to make.

The way you deliver that help can come in all shapes in sizes.

If you’re new to the industry you’re working in, then you’ll want to start with more personal services to get better at helping people change. Once you’ve mastered that you can move to less-personal services that are more scalable.

Here is a rough list in order from most personal, to least (and also roughly from most expensive, to least):

One-to-one Coaching/Consulting: Coaching is where you support people while they find their own solutions. Consulting is where you are hired to create a solution.

Masterminds/Group Coaching

Speaking

Courses

Membership Site

Book/Physical Product

Software As A Service

Faith

Daily ·

I grew up attending church every Sunday so for a long time the word faith carried a lot of religious context for me. Faith was always the word to describe belief in God (and occasionally something George Michael sung about on the radio).

But when you strip it back, faith is really the belief and conviction in something when you can’t see any evidence to support it. So when you run your own business it’s really important that you have faith in one thing…

You.

Running a business is a constant rollercoaster of doing things you’ve never done before. Things that might not work.

Practicing faith in ourselves teaches us to back ourselves. To trust, that even if we mess this all up, we’ll learn something and get through it.

Faith is the thing that will get you through those dark moments and help you keep showing up.

Systemise engagement

Daily ·

Back when I worked as a trainer, I was having trouble connecting with new members of my bootcamp. Quite often they would begin with attending every session but then over the first month they would gradually start missing more and more sessions until finally they would disappear all together.

Despite good intentions, I would completely forget to reach out to them. By the time I followed up with an email the next month, it was too late. I wouldn’t even hear back from them.

After losing 10+ hard won clients this way, I decided I needed to do something about it.

I knew I needed to contact them sooner. When they first started missing sessions not once they had disappeared completely. And I knew that something active like a phone call or text message would work better than something more passive like the emails I’d been sending.

The problem was that I would never take the time to do these important tasks.

Then I remembered about the art of Batching. Batching is where you take a bunch of little business admin tasks that usally fall through the cracks and set aside 30-60 minutes to get them all done.

I started setting aside 30 minutes every second day (Mon, Wed & Fri) for calling clients who had missed a session and texting a few other clients encouraging messages.

And it totally worked!

People couldn’t believe that I was actually calling them on the phone. They were touched to know that their trainer was concerned for them. They started communicating with me better and letting me know beforehand if they were going to miss a session. And people stopped falling through the cracks and disappearing.

Years later I was struggling with our online community for Bootcamp Ideas. So I did the same thing again.

Each week I put aside some 25 minute blocks to show up, answer questions and prompt conversations in the community. At the time we were on Facebook, so setting a timer for 25 minutes meant I could get in and connect without getting sucked down the social media rabbit hole.

Again it worked. The community responded to my input and grew to be the largest online community for group fitness trainers.

3 stats worth tracking

Daily ·

A few days ago I told you to stop checking your stats. The idea behind it was to get you to get out of your own way and spend more time doing work that matters.

That said, there are a few metrics that can give you a lot of information about your business and are worth periodically checking.

Retention: How many people are staying with you month to month? For a fitness business we want this to be at least 90%.

(Repeat customer: If you sell individual products, you don’t have to worry about retention, but it is worth seeing if people are coming back to buy something else from you again.)

New customers: You’ll never get retention to 100% so you need to make sure that you’ve got a steady trickle of new customers coming in to your business.

Earnings and Spendings: A very simple rule of business is to simply spend less money than you make. With technology crazy accessible and things relatively cheap, there is rarely a need these days to go into debt for a business. Make sure you are tracking these two figures and that the earnings is always larger than the spendings.

Weekly meetings

Daily ·

There is a trend in business books at the moment to talk about the negatives of meetings.

While I’m no fan of days which are meeting after meeting after meeting, I think for small businesses with teams of 2-5 people a weekly meeting can be an amazing thing.

The key is not to use the meeting as merely a way to pass down information but to use it as an opportunity to connect. Try to make it less about you and more about them.

Here are some guidelines:

  • Keep it short and purposeful
  • Spotlight a team member and let them share something they’ve learned
  • Check-in with how everyone on the team is doing work wise and mental health wise
  • Don’t share things that can just be shared in an email
  • Come prepared with something you can work on as a team