This week Matt and Rick discuss the 3 most common fears entrepreneurs must overcome to become successful in the personal training or fitness business.
What’s holding you back from your entrepreneurial dream? Rick and Matt reckon that fear is what is preventing you from taking the next step. In franchise development, you talk to many candidates. We have found the number one thing that keeps some people from becoming a franchisee or an entrepreneur is fear. So 99% of what happens in a franchise development seat is that you are helping people mitigate risk, but you can’t totally eliminate 100% of the risk.
Making the decision to own a business can also be an emotional journey because you’re helping them break belief systems. A lot of what we do is help people understand how they can own a small personal training business, work within their fitness industry passion, and replace their current income. The top three fears are rooted in some reality, so how do you overcome those fears.
Top 3 Fears Entrepreneurs Must Overcome
1. Lack of knowledge.
Many time people feel they don’t have enough specific knowledge about fitness to be a fitness business owner. Some feel they must be a personal trainer to own a personal training business. Also they are afraid of never being an entrepreneur before, which doesn’t mean you can’t be a business owner. You don’t need to know about real estate to build out a personal training facility. Entrepreneur fears are easily overcome with the opportunities a franchise package provides like Alloy Personal Training Franchise business model. We provide all the business structure, programming, systems, and support to start and operate a successful fitness business.
Alloy’s model also allows someone who doesn’t want to work in the personal training business everyday to be an investor, absentee, or semi-absentee owner. You don’t have to be a personal trainer, right, you just have to understand that we’ve got a process in place that will let you scale. For those don’t know facility design or real estate, we have a seven layer archetype build out for our franchisees. We help you put the personal training gym in the ideal location for the ideal customer base. We have a construction partner to help with the facility build out. We have vendor relationships for equipment.
Franchising allows you to partner with the franchise and bring all the right resources to you to have turnkey business.
2. Fear of Failure
Many people have a fear of failure and have a perception of what business should be. They also consider what friends and family might think and if you fail it will make you look dumb. People also consider they might not be smart enough. What if you lose money and fail. The perceptions just continue to pile up and compound. You need to rationally look at these fears and break down your own belief system to address perceptions that people bring to the table. What are my friends and family going to think when I go out and announce that I’m quitting my corporate job to open a gym. Their is a risk tolerance involved when leaving the big company with a predictable income to start your own business.
In prospective franchisee conversations, Rick may gauge someone is scared to make the decision and coaches them through the process. He helps them see the other side of the fear. For example, what if this person in 10 years didn’t take the risk on themselves and they had stayed in the same job. Maybe the company downsized and they lost their job. Maybe they dislike their boss or maybe they got laid off. All this could have been changed if you just could have taken a calculated risk by investing in yourself.
3. Lack of Talent
Finding good talent to work in your business is a common fear. Whether you are going to work in the business or be an absentee owner, most business struggle with this issue. How am I going to find the right people? How do I get people to work for me? I’m not a good leader. I don’t know how to sell memberships.
Part of the advantage of being with a franchise is we try to give you the tools to help you hire the right people, but we can’t do it on your behalf. You’re the entrepreneur, you have to make those decisions. But we can help you by giving you resources like sample ad copy for attracting this type of position. There are vendors that just does talent acquisition in the fitness space you can reach out to. We have screening tests that we use for employees that we have found to be very effective. We also spent time and money to develop the roles for Alloy. So if you say “I’m too worried I couldn’t find an operator.” We have tools to provide you with finding the right employees.
For more than 30 years, Rick provides years of experience to assuage these fears for any aspiring entrepreneur.
Listen in to learn of the opportunity that exists in the fitness industry and why you shouldn’t let fear hold you back from taking the next step.
- The No 1 thing that keeps people from owning a franchise (02:44)
- How to assuage the fear of lack of knowledge when starting a fitness business (05:09)
- Is perception from family and friends holding you back (08:21)
- Fear of failure (10:45)
- Why you shouldn’t be afraid to bet on yourself (12:07)
- How to overcome the fear of no talent (14:26)
- The advantage of being on an Alloy Franchise (16:25)
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Mentioned in this episode
Alloy Personal Training Franchise