Strategic Disruption Is Key To Business Evolution

In this podcast, Matt and Rick discuss how strategic disruption is the key to stay in business longer, and particularly in the fitness industry. If you don’t continue to evolve your business with disruptive strategies, your competitors will do it for you and put you out of business.

One of the superpowers of successful entrepreneurs is the ability to stay focused. The biggest issue that interferes in business growth and success is squirrel brain. If you chase too many ideas at once or get distracted on projects that aren’t part of your primary business focus, then you are more likely to not accomplish much at all. So it is critical to follow a strategy to help stay focused and on track to be more successful.

Disrupting your own business is hard for everybody involved, but there is a strategy for this process that is critical to follow. You must address each step of disruption and ensure your company culture supports this process.

Clayton Christensen described disruptive strategy in the book The Innovator’s Solution. Christensen, Professor at Harvard Business School, is one of the world’s top experts on disruption, innovation, growth, and strategy. His disruptive innovation framework provides guidance on how to approach strategic challenges to create new growth solutions.

The key to staying in business and evolving is to disrupt your own business.

Recently, Howard Schultz, Starbuck’s CEO, said, “If you’re not disrupting your own business periodically, then I guarantee you that the small and large competitors in your markets will do it for you.”

Disrupting your own business is hard for the business owner, but it’s equally hard for everyone. So you got to set a culture for it. You need to plan the disruptive ideas and technology, and you need to do it in the right way. You can’t stay in a business for 30 years if you do the same thing. It’s impossible.

Alloy’s disruption timeline started in 1992 with a one-hour, one-on-one personal training business model only. We started adding on other services, changed names, change our focus, started a licensing model, then evolved into our current franchise brand. We now have a unique business model with a

After a few years, we started 30 minute training sessions because we realized we could get 80% of the work done in half the time of a one-hour session. Over time, we determined we could increase our capacity to help more people in one session. Then we tweaked our programming to be very precise and efficient while still providing the personalized training experience to a small group of six people with one coach. With this model, now we offer a better personal training experience and lower cost for the clients.

Don’t make decisions based on your competition. We did what was best for the clients and best for the fitness business. We were the first in the country to do it. If you look at other fitness fads and trends over time like HIIT or bootcamps, the churn was higher; they paid a lot less; and they were more difficult to please. As our personal training business evolved, our clients paid more and got better service, so they ended up staying around longer. That’s why Alloy has 97% retention rates and a longer lifetime customer value.

One of our most important core values for Alloy is to drive change. Driving change really helps to disrupt your business and constantly improve your business model.

Learn more about how the Alloy teams help to drive change and innovation by creating positive strategic disruption. There is no guarantee in business, so it’s up to you to make a difference. Get a head start with the Alloy systems, training, technology and processes.