Creating the "New Normal:" Re-Shaping Your Brand Post-COVID

Club Automation

|

April 30, 2020

|

category

minute read

PUblished

April 30, 2020

This webinar is all about branding and content for your club. You’ll learn how to work smarter when publishing and promoting content on your website or via social media.

Ron Lamb, CEO of Daxko, guided this conversation with Rory Vaden, two-time New York Times bestselling author of his book Take the Stairs. Rory is also a world-renowned speaker, his TED talk has been viewed over three million times, he’s part of the Speaker Bureau Hall of Fame, and he's the co-founder of the Brand Builders Group.

Short on time? Here are the takeaways:

  1. There is opportunity amidst uncertainty. As soon as you can move out of shock and fear, you can quickly move into the mindset of: how can I help? What are our members struggling with? What tools, assets, and knowledge do we have available that we can provide to them?
  2. Publishing content helps keep your current members informed and your potential members interested. While keeping up with blogging, social media, and other forms of content marketing can easily feel overwhelming, the Content Diamond technique helps you focus your efforts on repurposing existing content.
  3. Blogging, social media, and YouTube are the main forms of content utilized by clubs. Rory breaks down how to max out your value in less time on each of these platforms.
  4. If you’re apprehensive about posting the same content across channels, remember that most of your existing and potential members consume information from you in one medium. Some are on Instagram, others check your website, and still others find you on YouTube.
  5. The future of business, especially health club business, belongs to people who understand a digital game and can leverage the power of technology, not to replace people, but to replace tasks so that you can free up your people.

For the full webinar, read below or play the recording above.

Video Transcription

Maria Morton: All right guys, we're going to go ahead and get started. First of all thank you everyone for taking part in our little chat. It's awesome to see how many people are tuning in from across the nation, Canada, we've got people from Michigan, Wisconsin all over the place. It's awesome to hear from you guys, and thank you so much for taking time out of your day to chat with us. Before we get started, I do want to run through a few quick housekeeping announcements. First of all, obviously if you guys have noticed you've all been muted, that's just to cut down background noise. We do still want you to stay engaged in the conversation.

Please do feel free to ask any questions you have, or any feedback or comments you have, either in the chat tool that you've already been using, or you can use the Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. We will try and answer as many questions as possible during the conversation, and we've also allocated about 10 to 15 minutes towards the end so that we can run through any questions as well. Final point, we are recording this webinar, so if you need to leave a little bit early, or if you want to rewatch the conversation, don't worry we will be sending it out by email within the next couple of days. With all that said, I would like to go ahead and hand over to Ron Lamb, CEO of Daxko, who will be helping guide this conversation with Rory. With that over to you Ron.

Ron Lamb: Thanks Maria, appreciate that introduction. It is with just absolute excitement that I'm thrilled to bring to you Rory Vaden. Rory is a two time New York Times bestselling author. He wrote a book a few years ago called Take the Stairs, which is just a terrific book. It's required reading for all of my leaders here at Daxko. It's the seven steps to achieving true success. I highly recommend that. He also wrote a book called Procrastinate on Purpose, which is about time management. It's five permissions to multiply your time to increase efficiency and productivity, seems like more and more none of us have enough time to get things done. His insights have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, he's been on Forbes, CNN, Entrepreneur Inc, Fox News, etcetera. I don't know if he's meant Oprah or not, but I bet he has, we'll have to ask him that.

He's been a world-renowned speaker, his Ted talk was viewed over three million times, and he was a two-time world champion of public speaking finalist, and listed as one of the top 100 speakers in the world, and is part of the Speaker Bureau Hall of Fame. He's also the co-founder with his lovely wife AJ, of the Brand Builders Group. At Brand Builders, he teaches mission-driven messengers. He teaches people who are heart-led leaders. What he's trying to do is help them influence more, impact their communities more with what he calls character-driven personal development training. Just the whole aspect of being mission-driven, being heart-led. I reached out to Rory I explained to him what was going on with this crisis, how it was devastating all of us in our fitness and childcare businesses.

I just simply reached out and I said, "Hey would you give us some of your time to help us learn how we can use social media, how we can use the digital economy, how we can build our brand to create influence?" Because we've got to influence our people to stay with us. We got to influence them and let them know that they will be able to safely return to our centers for fitness or childcare or whatever services we provide. We've got to figure out how to win back those we've lost, and we've got to also figure out how to leverage this whole digital virtual world. Without further ado, I want to ask all of you to join me and welcome Rory Vaden to our Daxko family. Rory, thanks for joining us from Nashville. How are you?

Rory Vaden: I'm doing good Ron, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Hi everyone. I'm in Nashville, Tennessee. That's my hometown these days.

RL: Well, as we get going here, first of all thank you for your time, I know how busy you are. I know you've got a ton of things going on, so thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving us some of your valuable time. We've talked a little bit, and I've shared with you the different personas of our 10,000 plus customers. Just out of the gate, what are you thinking about in terms of them and this crisis and all of the challenges that they're faced with today?

Finding Opportunity Amidst Uncertainty

RV: The first thing is, my heart goes out to everybody, it's a scary time, it's a challenging time in many ways. It's uncertain, I think it's an uncertain time. But where my mind immediately goes for everybody who's a leader, an entrepreneur, running a nonprofit, small business, whatever you want to call it is that, it is in the times of the greatest uncertainty that there is the most opportunity. If you think about there's a law of physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well, for every challenge there is an equal and opposite opportunity. All of business, and all of leadership comes from helping people solve problems. We have a new set of problems that have just suddenly come on the scene, and it's forcing everybody to have to live and work differently. The natural default is to just be scared, right? Or to be unsure just to be worried. It's not wrong to do that. In fact, it means that you have a normal functioning brain to do that.

But there is a trained mind or a disciplined person, the ultra-performers the multipliers, these top people that we study and look at, they will also realize that there is great opportunity because there's great need. Not to be opportunistic, but to be servant minded in the fact that if we can help people solve problems, then we will attract people. If our business helps people solve problems, then we will attract people. The need for health hasn't gone down, it's gone up. The need for what you do is stronger than ever. The modality at which it is being provided has changed dramatically in the short-term, and probably in the long-term in at least some way.

I think if you can get out of that shock and you can get out of that fear, and you can quickly go to the place of how can I help? How can I be of value? What are our members struggling with? What do our customers really need? What do we have, what tools and assets and knowledge do we have available that we can provide to them and be useful? That business is going to win. That business is going to recover quickly. A lot of the greatest, there's some really great companies that came out of the last recession because it's a new way to do business. That opportunity is there because there's a lot of need.

RL: We've seen estimates as much as four to five million people have canceled their memberships to whatever, a YJ or a fitness facility. Now I know some of that is income-driven. We've got 30 million people in the United States or plus who are unemployed. For some of them, they don't have that discretionary income, but as you know the need and we've seen this disease, people who are in better shape seem to be faring better and recovering better than those who have chronic health issues, diabetes, obesity, whatever it might be. I think that the burden to be in shape is even higher.  

Right now, what we're seeing statistically is across all of our customers, the communications keep going down. From week to week to week, we keep seeing this drop in communications, at least the volume of emails and texts that are going out globally. What are your thoughts about strategies or methods that you would suggest during this crisis, because right now most of our fitness facilities are not open. We're going to start easing into that in May and June. How would you see methods for we're in the crisis, and then as we move out of the crisis and we move to kind of this new normal, what are your thoughts and strategies you could share?

RV: Well, there's a couple things. I do think it's anchored really, really strongly to the idea of just going, how can I help? What would be of value? Now I think the trend of going digital was already happening. What this has done is it has accelerated with incredible urgency. I would be focused, and this is our clients aren't all fitness, we work with a number of fitness personalities, because Brand Builders does personal brand strategy. That's what we do, is we help them build and monetize their brands. You cut out, I think, are you on mute?

RL: We just kind of jumped right into it. Maybe take a minute and explain what Brand Builders does. You've had a lot of different successful businesses in your career. But I apologize, I'm like [inaudible 00:10:48] get into some ideas. But just take a minute to tell people what you're doing with Brand Builders today.

Brand Builders

RV: For sure. We are a personal brand strategy firm. We work with a lot of influencers, celebrities, speakers, authors, stay-at-home moms that have blogs, podcasters, anybody looking to monetize their personal brand. It's not a direct overlap with the gym because we don't do branding for companies. Everything that we do is around personality-driven marketing. A lot of it is digital. It's building an online following, building an online audience. By the way, those of you that are on social, if you go to Instagram or whatever, my handle is just Rory Vaden. You can connect with me there. I have when we exited our last business, I have been starting all over. I've had to start a brand new podcast, all new social media.

I've had to rebuild my whole email list here in the last less than two years ago. I've been having to redo this myself, and I had millions of followers and people that I was reaching every week before we sold our last company. But this idea of how do you cultivate an audience, and in many ways I think what we're doing is we're automating trust. We're trying to create connections with people through modern tools, that it's still this human to human bond, this human to human interaction, but we're using digital tools to do that. That's more of like the marketing side is going okay, how do I build a fan base? How do I build an audience? How do I cultivate customers using digital tools that are available today? There's tons of them, and they work really, really well if you know how to do them and you have a clear strategy, but they work. They're horrible if you try to do all of them at the same time and you get pulled in a thousand directions, and there's not a clear strategy.

Then the other part is how do you service? How do you use these technological tools to service people? Now, obviously there's an inherent nature of running a gym or a club or a Y or a JCC that's physical, right? The whole concept is coming to a location. I think that will return, there's no doubt about it, and hopefully will return quickly, whenever it does, hopefully it'll come back quickly. I think there's reasons to think that it will. I think the need to supplement the digital experience is going to be a permanent thing. I mean, look, here we are all meeting on a virtual platform. People maybe have never done this before. Well, people are starting to realize, wow, I can get education, I can get training, I can do so many things from home using these tools. That's going to cause businesses to go, how can we accelerate the delivery of supportive content and experience from home? Home-based workouts.

I think in general digitization is what's happening. We sometimes define personal branding as simply the digitization of reputation. Personal branding is just the digitization of reputation. What somebody would be known for in real life through contacts and trust and networks. When you go digital, it's called the personal brand, but really the concept has been around for decades as reputation. What are you known for, and how can you serve and build an audience and provide value? That's what we do is the strategy of it and then also the execution in terms of the tools to get customers or to get fans, nurture them to become customers, and then deliver some type of a digital experience on the backend, either in support of your primary business or an entirely virtual business model.

RL: As you think about the challenge for-

Attendee: Methods do you suggest that we employ?

RL: Hey Joe I can hear you if you want to just jump in.

Attendee: Sorry, go ahead.  

RL: Please, you have a question.

Attendee: Go ahead finish yours and I'll go to mine. I didn't mean to jump over on top of you.  

RL: No worries. What's a strategy, because I realized that they're a little different a personal brand, but I think it's not that much different as far as strategies and execution. What are some things off the top of your head that people in fitness and childcare ought to be thinking about?

The Content Diamond Technique

RV: If you get into like a tactic here of what we're doing, you mentioned that your data is showing that your users are sending less and less communication. I think that's the kind of a kiss of death. It's like, we need to be providing more value. We need to be in more communication or at least at the same level of communication as we would normally to stay top of mind. That's really, really important. Whether that's getting your old members back, keeping your new members in, or attracting new members, marketing in general is just staying top of mind. From a content marketing strategy, one of our favorite things to do in terms of simplifying the whole social media process, is we use a technique that we call the content diamond.

There is this challenge of going, how do I, because it's overwhelming, right? It's like I don't have time and now I probably have less staff even, I probably had to lay off people or furlough them. Maybe you have less time and you've got, well, you probably have more time, you got less staff. But you go, how do I keep up with podcasts and YouTube and Facebook and TikTok now and Pinterest? There's so much to do. One of our favorite things, and this is a super simple idea, is that we encourage business owners to create one piece of content every week that is like a five-minute video. That if you follow this content diamond process, what you'll do is that will fill the entire content calendar for the entire week.

Actually, I'll just, let me just, I'll pop up a little diagram here, I think it will help everybody see this. All right. The concept of this content diamond is to spend more time repurposing content before just creating new content. I think people get overwhelmed because they're like, I can't keep up with all these different social media sites, I don't have that much time. Well, the way that this works is like so it's super simple.

Pick One Question to Answer

RV: We say, first of all, pick one question to answer. What is one question that your members have? What is one aspect of their health, could be diet, could be fitness, could be recovery, could be stretching, could be muscular.

RL: Right now, I think top of mind is safety, because people are scared.

RV: Yeah. You can talk about making sure you're having whatever, anything related to cleanliness. If you just list out 52 questions that my audience has or that my prospects have, or that my members have, this will fill your entire content calendar for a year.

Spend Two Minutes Preparing What You’re Going to Say

RV: Then what you do, is you spend two minutes preparing what you're going to say, not two days, not two hours, just two minutes. There's a simple formula that you can use, we call it QAC. It's just this is going to be the outline of your video question, answer, call to action, question, answer, call to action.

Record Three Minutes on “Problem” and Three on “Solution”

RV: Then here's what you do. You're going to record three minutes on the problem or the question. Another way of thinking about this would be problem, solution, call to action is go, here's the problem when it comes to your diet, blah, blah, blah, or your flexibility or endurance. When it comes to working out from home, yada, yada, yada.

Then you're going to list off the problem. Then you're going to spend maybe a couple of minutes talking about the solution. Here's my quick tip, here is my idea, here is my strategy. Then the call to action is going to be anything from share this post or leave a question below, or head over to our website to buy a special deal or to gift a membership to a friend or whatever. A call to action could be to buy something, or it could just be to create conversation and engagement. But the point is, is that we do this on our phone. I literally just take out the phone, talk for three minutes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then that video becomes the top of your content diamond. Now, if you really want to get engagement, you could do that as a live, like you would go live on Facebook.

If you're nervous about going live, then you could just record it on your phone and you could do a few takes. Once you have the video you have the top of the diamond. Then what you're going to do, is you're going to, and technically I would say this too Ron, is technically at this point, the business owner or the executive director or whoever the face is, or whoever made the video could be done. Everything from this point out could be done by an intern or an assistant or the marketing coordinator or whatever. But basically you're going to take that video down, and then we're going to upload it to a transcription tool. Our favorite tool is rev.com, R.E.V or Temi T-E-M-I.com. You upload this video that you just recorded. It's going to spit out a transcription.

It's going to take what you said and for like a few bucks not even, maybe a few dollars, it will transcribe everything you just said. Then you take that transcription, and that is going to head down what we call the text and imagery path.

The Text and Imagery Path

RV: Somebody is going to edit that transcription, and they're just going to make it coherent because the spoken word isn't quite the same in written format. But somebody is going to polish that up into a full length article. Now that video that you recorded becomes a full length article that you can post on LinkedIn, particularly in the pulse section of LinkedIn, which is LinkedIn's built in blogging platform. Medium is another place that you could post, if you're familiar with Medium or you have Medium, and you post the full length article.

The other thing that you're going to do is you're going to, whoever's editing that article is going to strip out one or two of these image quotes. They're going to take like the key idea, and they're going to take that one sentence, and they're going to make that into an image quote, and I'll show you I can show you an example of how we actually do this. I'll give you the overview and then I'll show you in real life. Now you have this image quote, that image quote you can post on Pinterest and on Instagram.

The Video and Audio Path

RV: Simultaneously while that is all happening, you're going to create a video and audio path, where you take that same video that you recorded, and then you send it to a video editor. You have someone on your team, grab a teenager or someone who can edit. They're going to take that raw video, and they're going to make it a little fancy.

That just means they might put a little intro on the front. Maybe they'll put some royalty-free music underneath. They might drop in some quotes on the screen to highlight whatever you're saying. They could put funny backgrounds behind you. They can do like a lower third that introduces your name and your position in your company or whatever. But they're going to clean up that video, and then they post that full length video to your YouTube channel. Now you got this nice, clean, polished video on YouTube, you can strip the audio off of that video. Now that you've got this nice video, you can easily strip the audio out of that video and upload it as a short form podcast. Now all of a sudden you have a podcast. Then the same video editor will create a 60 second version of that video, and they post that to Instagram.

Now you have your image quote on Instagram from this path, but then you also have a video, a 60 second, a shorter version of your full-length YouTube video on Instagram. You can also post that same video to TikTok. That's one of the things that we've added to the process here recently.

The Content Diamond in Summary

RV: What you're doing is you created one piece of content, it took you five minutes, but now your brand is going out across the web, without adding any additional content creation to the strategy. Now, the key here is, ultimately you want to bring all of those assets together back on your blog. The only place that people can get all of these things together is on your blog. You're building your profiles on social because you're playing in these spaces, but you're still ultimately, we want to drive our audience back to our website.

For us, we really encourage the blog, just not for blogging sake, but just to use it as a central repository. You never want to build your audience on rented real estate. If you build your whole company on Facebook, and then Facebook changes the algorithm, you're hosed because you don't have that relationship. One of the great things about Daxko is you guys do so many of these communications behind the scenes that help people pull all this together. But this is it conceptually, is you now have all of these little assets created from one piece of content distributed across the web. Do you want me to show you a real life example of what this actually looks like?

RL: I think that would be terrific. We do have members of our audience that have dedicated teams in social and digital marketing, but the vast majority do not. I've had conversations, I won't mention the name, but it was a lady in the martial arts community. She's got a couple of black belts. I definitely won't mention her name, but we sat through a presentation, a marketing presentation. It was not from Daxko it was from a different company. I went up to her afterwards just we happened to be in the coffee line. I said, "What did you think of that?" She goes, "You know what? It was really, really great, except for one thing." I said, "What's that?" She goes, "After about 30 seconds, I had no idea what that person was talking about." She goes, "I don't know what a blog is." She starts naming SEO, SEM, blah, blah, blah. This person talked in our language-

RV: So high level, yeah.

Digital Marketing

RL: She's like I don't have a clue. Frankly that occurred about two years ago, and one of the things was like, I'm like, you know what? We have to go solve that problem. We have to translate this and make it easy for our customers. If you could walk through the example, and I think just for those people who may be like her and be a little scared of asking a question, like what is a blog and what is Instagram? Just take us through that, that would be fantastic.

RV: Yeah, totally and there's no silly questions. I'm still very much learning things every day that I'm like, oh my gosh, I didn't even know you could do that. I think if you see a real-life example, so you understand the high-level strategy, and I'll show you how it works in real life is to go... Let me just share my screen here and I'll show you. If you go to roryvadenblog.com that is my blog. I share tips on leadership, personal development, personal branding, leadership and productivity. There's a little free video course there too. If you go to roryvadenblog.com you can actually get that free kind of stuff and you'll see how I do this. But a blog is basically you have your website, so you've got whatever pages of your website, but a blog is just, it's kind of like if you were a news company, you think of yourself as like a media company, this would be your company's channel.

Blogging

RV: You're publishing content, and these are all the things that are going on. Well, it's just a place, a repository. Blog comes from web log. It's like, think of it almost as like what a diary, what a physical diary would be to a person is like what a virtual blog is to a company. It's like, these are the things that I'm thinking about that I'm working on. The point of a blog is to not tell people everything that's happening in your company. The point is to put out information that's useful to people. If it's useful, then people will come to it. But if you look at an example: I record a video on my phone and that's how it would start out. I'm just going to pop up so you can see the, well, I'll show you. I'll just show you. This is my blog. I'm going to click on my most recent article, which was about stress. It says better organization is not the answer.

What happened was I recorded a video on my phone, we uploaded it to rev.com and it got transcribed, and then someone on my team just came in and cleaned it up. This is my voice, but I didn't technically write it. They transcribed my voice, somebody edited it, and now I have this nice, quick little article, all about how gratitude will be a more powerful response to stress than trying to control stuff. That's the idea of this little article.  

Social Posting

RV: Now, right here, this is the little pullout quote. The highest response to stress is not more organization, the highest response to stress is more gratitude. If you go to my Instagram page, you'll see this is that post. When we're using the content diamond, and I said all right, they transcribed it, they took it out, they posted it here.

Then the actual like the caption, it gives them the first part of the article. But then it says to see the full length article and video visit my blog. It leverages the power of a social media site. I'm producing original content on their site to serve them and their audience, and for me to grow my audience there. But ultimately, I'm trying to bring back people back to me so that I can convert them to my various products and services. This part's like a little teaser. This is like a little nugget and then a little teaser. Now the original video that I recorded on my phone, and let me, sorry, let me do this. Let me share, I'll play this so you can actually hear a little bit of it. This was... This is a little fancy intro, let me turn that down. It's loud on my end, I know it's loud for all of y'all. That was just a fancy intro that we designed once, and every video we start has that. It makes it polished.

Then if you listen here, listen there's music underneath. That's royalty-free music that we go download. This is stock imagery, you don't have to do this, this will be like pretty high-level production. You go to these libraries where you can download stock video imagery and they're dropping it in. I'll show you the original video. That was the original video. This is the way it looked as I recorded it on my phone. But then they dropped in this music, a few little images, here's some lower, this is called lower third text. There's so many tools that do this stuff, if Daxko doesn't already have it built in to the process. I'm sure you guys could build this in too for people over time. That is the full-length video right here. If you go to my YouTube channel, here is... I got to figure out where is so my videos. Here is my latest video, so there it is.

YouTube Content

RV: I just have my YouTube channel organized since I talk about different topics. I got personal development, leadership, personal branding and then productivity, which easily you could have, it could be diet, it could be immune system, it could be endurance, it could be flexibility. You could create just these little subtopics if you wanted. But the point is, is now that little piece of content was there. Now, so we first on one day we posted like this was one day which was the pullout quote. Now this is the exact same video, except it's only 60 seconds. It's literally just a 60 second version of the full video. I was done after five minutes, but you have your team running, and I'm rebuilding my social media following from scratch as I mentioned to y'all. I'm doing this.

This is my profile it's brand new. But you can see we're getting hundreds of views already on just people tuning in and watching this, and then coming back to my blog. Let's see what else do we do here. Then it's the same thing. If you go to my Facebook page, there will be somewhere on here there will be that pullout quote would be one post. Anyways, I think you get the idea. If you want to see it all in one place... This is today. I got to go back a few days to see, but here's another one that's a recent example. If you want to get it all together, then people come to my blog and then I use, I give them a lead magnet to help get them subscribed.

Once they become a fan, once they come to my actual blog, I have their email address I'm communicating to them every single time, every time I make a new post. It's kind of like social media are these satellites that are redirecting or these tributaries that redirect people back to the main stream, which is my blog. They are free traffic sources that drive people back to me. Then once you build this, this just becomes an automated machine that grows and grows and grows and grows, and we repeat it. It's extremely simple process. You just do it over and over again.

MM: Rory I'd love to ask you a quick question that's come in from [inaudible 00:36:21] Monica.

RV: Hi Monica.

MM: She's asked if you recommend posting the same content that 60 second clip pullout quote across both Facebook and Instagram. What would be your advice for that?

Posting the Same Content

RV: Yes absolutely. People worry about, oh my gosh, am I posting the same content? Are people going to get annoyed? The truth is that the people who watch one channel don't watch the other channel as much. Then also because of the algorithms, only a very small fraction of your audience is going to see it anyways. The likelihood of the same person seeing the same content on both platforms is very, very low. People usually hang out on whichever one is their favorite. The point is, it's not that one social media channel is better than the other, it's that you want to produce content that is appropriate for that environment.

It's just like communicating where you don't communicate how you like to communicate, you communicate the way that the receiver likes to receive the information, in terms of how you speak. But yeah, I would repurpose that for sure and I do. Now if you get more sophisticated and if you have a bigger team, and I was just going to check and see if I've got let's see if you have... My TikTok is, I'm going to see if I could pull up, I don't even know I'll have to see if I could pull that up I'll show you an example. But it's the same thing on TikTok too.

RL: It's funny, I've got a 25-year-old an 18-year-old and a 15-year-old and they all use different platforms, and they do not intersect. The younger ones when I say the word Facebook, they just roll their eyes, and they just shake their head and they're like that's two or three generations ago. I think you've got to hit all of those mechanisms to hit those different personas.

RV: That's the beauty about digital. Even though it's like, gosh this is hard, it's confusing, I don't know how to do it. Well, everything is that the first time you do it. But the power of digital is you can be everywhere. You can reach exponentially more people for only a linear amount of additional extra time.

Leveraging Tools and Tech to Eliminate Tasks

RL: One of the things I've learned from you about Procrastinate on Purpose from you directly in your book, is leveraging tools and technology to eliminate manual tasks. What's interesting is I've talked to my owners and CEOs, many of them unfortunately furloughed 90, 95% of their staff. Several of them have told me, "I want to fundamentally rethink building my organization back up. I don't want to just go back Groundhog Day and do it exactly the same way." What is your view on leveraging tools and technology to do a better job reaching, promoting your brand, advertising, marketing, and any other things that you do?

RV: Yeah, well that's a big one, and that'd be worth to look at my Ted talk if you're looking for ideas on how to multiply time, which is what my Ted talk was about, which is free and that's just out there. The way that I think about this Ron is, I was sitting down with one of the wealthiest people that I know. This was several years ago now. We were sitting at this Starbucks in Cardiff by the sea, which is like a really ritzy Southern California neighborhood. Out of the corner of my eye, and Darren was his name, I'm sitting with Darren and I notice this Bentley pulls up in the drive-through of Starbucks. I love Bentleys I think they're so gorgeous, so I noticed it. Then behind the Bentley, I noticed there's like a Ferrari and then a Maserati. Then I look over in the parking lot and there's like Rolls-Royce, Lamborghini. It dawns on me that I'm in a very different neighborhood than the trailer park in Boulder, Colorado that I grew up in.

I asked Darren this question, I said, "Darren, what do you think is the difference between rich people and everybody else?" He said, "Well Rory, it's all in how they think." He said, "For example, if I could go into this Starbucks and I could hear the way that people were making a decision, their thought process, I could tell you with almost 100% guaranteed accuracy which one of those people is either already wealthy or destined to be wealthy just by how they're thinking." Because he said most people walk into Starbucks and they ask themselves, do I want the coffee? If I want the coffee, this would be like lower middle class thinking. They walk in they say do I want the coffee? Yes. What do I have to do to get the coffee? They're governed by short-term impulses. They'll do whatever it takes to get the coffee. They'll beg for the coffee, they'll steal it, they'll put it on a credit card. I just want my short-term coffee.

But most people don't do that. Most people are very logical. They walk in and they ask themselves two questions. Number one, do I want the five dollar coffee? If the answer is yes, then their second question is, do I have five dollars? Which is, I remember telling Darren, I said, "I don't get it. That seems like a perfectly fair question to me." He said, "It is a fair question. There's nothing wrong with that question." He said, "But that's not how wealthy people think." He said, "The way that a wealthy person evaluates that decision is altogether differently. A wealthy person knows that if they spend five dollars on this coffee, that's five dollars they're not investing on something else." I said, "You're talking about opportunity cost." He said, "Yes, but there's more to it than that."

He said, "Because a wealthy person knows if they were to invest that five dollars instead of spend that five dollars, that because of compounding interest, that five dollars would grow over time to be worth more than five dollars. Not only would you have the five dollars, you'd have more than five dollars." As a quick math example, he said, "Five dollars invested at eight percent return for 30 years, would grow to be worth about $50." He said, "A wealthy person's second question is totally different. Their question is not what do I have to do to get this coffee? Their question is not, do I have five dollars? To a wealthy person they ask themselves, is this five dollars coffee worth $50 to me 30 years from now?" What? That's crazy. I had never heard anything like that. That was a totally different way of thinking.

Well, now you might be watching, and you're listening and you're going, okay Rory what does money and rich people and compounding interest have anything to do with what we're talking about? That's a good question, because it wasn't obvious to me either. But then when I was writing Procrastinate on Purpose, I'm sitting there writing the book, it literally hit me that automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money. Automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money. Just like compounding interest takes money and it turns it into more money, automation takes time, and it turns it into more time. Because anything that you create a process for today saves you time tomorrow, because tomorrow the process is doing the thing.

This is why I think Daxko is so important and it's such a cool role that you play. The purpose of automation isn't to get rid of jobs, it's to get rid of tasks. It frees up people to do more creative thinking. It frees up people to build relationships. It frees up people to be with people, and do people things rather than task things. Even this little content diamond process, it's not really automated that's more of what we call delegate which is one of the parts of the focus funnel. Again, check out the Ted talk if you want the free highlights. This concept, I think, is so important, and in a digital world, which is where we've been going, and we just stepped on the gas pedal. Things will get back to normal from the standpoint of like we'll go back to work again and we'll have business, but I think it's going to change business forever.

The Future of Health Club Business

RV: In the future, the future of business belongs to people who understand a digital game, and can leverage the power of tools and technology, not to replace people, but to replace tasks so that you can free up your people. So that you can spend more time with your customers and build relationships and build connections, and train and motivate and teach and hold people accountable, and do the human things and let the business grow itself using more of these automated processes. I think that automation is huge, and there is so much opportunity right now and look, this is the time to be doing it. While you're sitting at home and you're not going to the gym every day, you can be building funnels, you can be building social media processes, you can be recording videos, you can be creating courses, you can be uploading content to what is it? SugarWOD? You guys have your whole SugarWOD thing?

I would be pumping out content to that thing as fast as possible. Creating workouts and going digital. It doesn't mean that I'm never going to have a gym again, people are still going to want to go to the gym. There's power in leaving the house, getting free, the accountability of being around other people. Even though you don't talk to anyone at the gym because that's not allowed, there's still power in the group motivation of being there. But as business owners, it's like we have to leverage the tools of technology to take away the mundane.

Questions

RL: We're seeing that with the virtual workout experience workout at home. I suspect that's going to be a permanent part of our future in the future for everybody in fitness, no question about it. Well, thank you for sharing that. Do you have time for some questions? We've had some panelists throw in some questions.

RV: Sure, yeah, of course. I would also just throw out too again, if you leave a question and a comment or DM me on Instagram or something, Instagram is the one place that I'm actually, and then also at my blog. Those are where I personally am at. If we don't get to your question, you can hit me up on Instagram or at my blog.

RL: Excellent. Well, a couple of them as we were talking. One was, is branding all social media and technology-based? What about branding within the four walls of your business?

RV: To me branding actually has little to do with technology, to me branding is: what do people think of when they think of you? That's what a brand is. I think it's very closely to reputation. What do people think of when they think of you? I think of personal branding as just the digitization of that. Branding is about impressions, and you don't control your brand. Your brand is what other people think of when they think of you. You can influence that heavily by how frequently you communicate to them, how consistent your messaging is, how clear your messaging is, and just the sheer volume and velocity of how many people know about you and talk about you. That is what creates brand. But in terms of... I'm not sure I fully understand the question of branding inside the four walls.

If you're branding a... I think it's like you brand individual programs. You brand your certain classes, and each instructor that teaches 30 minute abs class, that person is like a sub-brand of the overall brand. The way that you hire and select people on your staff, those are all things that contribute to your brand that I would go, it doesn't have anything to do with digital, it's more about culture and people and what we believe. But again, the sum total of that is what do people think of when they think of us? That's what branding really is, is what type of experience do we want to provide? This is part of why I think branding is so important right now, is you go, if our gym is just a place to work out and that's all it is to people, we're going to be at big risk because there's a million other things people could do and other places that they could go.

But if our place is a place where they go these people provide value to me to help me be healthy. These people take care of my kids. These people know my family. These people encourage me. They encourage me, they entertain me, they educate me, they care about me. The beautiful thing about right now is even though you can't see your customers every day, you can still care about them from home because of digital tools. You can let them know I'm thinking about you, you're important to me. I don't know if we'll ever do business again, but I wanted to give you a couple ideas to do with your kids to stay healthy, or a couple of things you could do. Because if you're at home and you're watching Netflix all day, you need to remember to stand up and stretch. You can care about people even when you're not profiting from them. That hasn't changed at all with COVID-19.

RL: For sure. Got another question for you. When it comes to producing content, what is the one tool you could not live without?

RV: Clearly my phone, like the phone.

RL: What's next to it? Next to your phone.  

RV: I don't know if they're looking for like a technical thing or if it's like an... I mean, the content diamond does not survive. It doesn't work without that transcription piece. Using rev.com or temi.com, some type of transcription tool is a real game changer because it drives this text-based creation. I know this is where we get into a little bit of fancy speak. Google can read text it can't listen to a video. When you record a video, Google can read the title of that video, but it doesn't know what's on the video. But when you transcribe the video and you put the words on the page, now Google can read the page, and they know what that page is about, which drives something called SEO, search engine optimization, which just basically means your website becomes more findable.

For most of you, you don't have to be number one on Google for like CrossFit, it's more like CrossFit Nashville, or even more localized than that, CrossFit Brentwood, or best CrossFit Brentwood or martial arts. Really, you're playing. If it were me and I was creating content for my gym, I would really focus on dropping in local keywords. Primarily you're selling memberships to a local community, but again, as the world goes virtual and goes more digital that could really change a lot. Then you go, well yeah, I'm competing but. Anyways, I think that's a pretty critical tool.

RL: We've been talking about the diamond content. Thank you so much for sharing. What are your thoughts about how we can go after people we've lost or other businesses have lost? Like I said, there's probably five million orphans or junk balls out there. That is a huge, huge number. What are you thinking about that you would use beyond what you've shared now to try to attract new people?

RV: Well, here's the thing that I think a lot of small businesses failed at. I know not every business here is small, we have some massive businesses that you guys represent and support. Where people failed was they never got all their customers together in the first place, like on Facebook. I'll give you a great example. We pay every month to be members of the Nashville Zoo, because I have a three-year-old son and a 10-month-old, and we love the freaking zoo. It is the coolest thing. The Nashville Zoo is really awesome. Of course the zoo is closed. Whoever runs the zoo, I don't know who this was, but somebody was brilliant enough to go, "Hey, people are probably going to look at canceling their zoo membership." What did they do? They started every day an 11:00 AM live feed, feed where they feed the animals.

They just go live on Facebook, and here's the tech, the tech that supports the whole thing, it's a private Facebook group. They invited all of the people in their database to be in their private Facebook group. If you're an active member you're in, and then when they go live on Facebook, they just go live but only to the private group, so it's only the members who can view this. They're sharing things that are happening with the animals. Of course, the kids are at home all day and parents are going like, gosh, dude, give me something to occupy my child for 30 minutes. This is incredible and now it's part of our schedule, like its part of our routine. Just by going how can we be useful? The idea to me there is gathering your customers in one place. If you haven't done that, not just email, but going what can I do to get people to follow me somewhere?

If you're going to use Facebook and Facebook is powerful because it has the groups feature and it has the live, is you can do a contest and you send an email to all of your customers, and you say, "Hey, we are starting a private group for our members only so that they can share their home, to do accountability workouts from home, and so that our trainers can do live broadcast to you." Whoever was my Saturday 30-minute abs person can come and lead the class, and we're going to lead the classes using Facebook or maybe something that Daxko provides. Incentivize people to join, to go look, here's how you enter the contest. You got to go click this link, ask to be a part of the group, and then leave a comment in the group that says whatever, whatever. Then we'll do a random drawing for a free tee shirt or for a free gas card, or a free water bottle or a free protein-

RL: Membership fees for a month.  

RV: Membership fees for a month. But now part of the power is in the community, and it is getting those people together and staying top of mind. They're getting value even though they're not coming to the gym, it's like how can I create value for them? I can continue to give them education. I can continue to give them encouragement. Hey, if we can use SugarWOD or we can use a private Facebook group or something to do live workouts and home-based workouts, and I'll tell you what, man, if you can occupy the kids somehow right now, that is a freaking gold mine. Ask yourself what problems do my members have? How can I be useful? What can I do for them that would be useful? If you can come up with something, then I think you're going to be on a good path. So anyways, start with getting your existing people, and then you could do the same thing in terms of the orphan folks, if you're running the content diamond, you're going to naturally attract people.

The only thing I would add is I would use hashtags like cities, like Brentwood. It would be like taekwondo from home. I might start a hashtag like taekwondo from home, and then hashtag Louisville. People will start following. The other thing is trying to do local influencer campaigns, is figuring out... There's a bunch of people in Nashville, there's this woman I don't even know her real name is Happily Grey, but she's like huge influencer. All the local Nashville shops, whether it's the juice shop or it's like a workout company, they all try to do promotions with her to try to get them to talk about what they're doing. Or you can go live with them. You can do a split live, and just provide education and value to the audience. But I think virtually you can educate and you can encourage, those are things that you can do virtually right now.

RL: Well, I have to say you have educated and you have encouraged all of us. I've been taking notes feverishly, I hope that our audience has as well. I think that the next two, three, four, five months are going to really have a huge burden on us communicating and educating. Daxko as a whole has pulled together a cross-functional group of experts to build a reopening guide to safely reopen our facilities and our childcare and what are the best practices. What we're hearing in the communities a lot of people are just plain nervous. What we want to do and where the content diamond fits right in the wheelhouse is, figure out ways to communicate this to our communities that you can safely and really minimize the risk of getting this disease, but you can safely return. The other side is if we don't go back and we embrace physical fitness, mental wellbeing, I think there's some real downsides to that as well. I know my own physical fitness I'd be embarrassed if this camera was a little lower showing [inaudible 01:01:06].  

We got to get back at it for sure. Thank you so much for giving us your time. As I said at the beginning of our broadcast, these are required books for people to read who spend any time or on my leadership team, we just went through this one a couple of months ago. For those in our audience who have not read those books, I highly, highly recommend them. Then I also encourage everybody to log in. Rory sends out very inspirational messages and videos on a regular basis. I'm not ashamed to admit I steal your thoughts regularly and forward. I don't steal them I just forward them, share them within our leadership team. You've been a great friend and a source of tremendous inspiration, and can't thank you enough for sharing with our community.

RV: Well, thank you Ron. If anybody wants to talk, if you go to freebrandcall.com/rv, we do free strategy calls for small business owners who are looking to get their mind wrapped around some of this. But yeah I want to encourage you. It will get better. It probably will be different a little bit, but it will get better. I would echo right back you and the whole Daxko team, I know that you care deeply about serving your customers. You guys do an exceptional job, and I know that's only going to get better and better and better. I can't think of a better tool or place a suite of tools really to be using to grow a membership-based health, fitness kind of business than working with you guys. Anyways, thanks for having me.

RL: Our pleasure Rory, give my best to AJ okay.

RV: All right, likewise to Kristi. Bye man.

RL: All right take care.

New call-to-action

What’s a Rich Text element?

Thi sis a

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

dadasd

Static and dynamic content editing. A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

Static and dynamic content editing

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

ddddd

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

dsadadasdas

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

  • Just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection
  • Any collection and then connect
  • This i any collection and then connect

Into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!

other articles

continued reading

Top Fitness Industry Trends to Know for 2024

read article

Top Fitness Industry Trends to Know for 2024

We analyzed 880+ Club Automation users to discover the fitness industry trends to know in 2024. Learn how we grew in 2023 and how to keep that momentum in 2024.

Read Article

How to Improve Your Gym Sales Funnel with Automation

read article

How to Improve Your Gym Sales Funnel with Automation

Discover insights on optimizing your gym sales funnel with automation. Learn how to leverage technology to draw in new members and keep current members engaged.

Read Article

Your Guide to IHRSA 2024

read article

Your Guide to IHRSA 2024

IHRSA 2024 is almost here. Use this guide to discover must-see events, plan your schedule, and navigate the convention to have the best experience possible.

Read Article

How to Start Persona-Based Marketing at Your Fitness Club

read article

How to Start Persona-Based Marketing at Your Fitness Club

Understanding your members is the key to growing your club. Unlock growth by creating member personas and boost engagement through persona-based marketing.

Read Article

How a New Website Transformed a Mom & Pop Gym Into a Modern Fitness Center

read article

How a New Website Transformed a Mom & Pop Gym Into a Modern Fitness Center

Discover how Coaches’ Corner Fitness transformed their operations with a new fitness club website designed by Club Automation.

Read Article

10 Tips for Creating Your Fitness Club’s Social Media Strategy

read article

10 Tips for Creating Your Fitness Club’s Social Media Strategy

Social media is an integral part of your members’ lives. Follow these tips to create a social media strategy that connects with them.

Read Article

Club Automation's Integration with Epifany: Boosting Member Engagement

read article

Club Automation's Integration with Epifany: Boosting Member Engagement

Discover how Club Automation's integration with Epifany can help fitness businesses engage members, understand pain points, and boost sales while reducing churn. Learn more about this powerful partnership today!

Read Article

Ready to outrival
the best?

Talk to our team and unlock your full potential.

Get a Demo
Get a Demo