Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Tuesday with Terry. My name’s Terry. And I’m your friend. We’re talking to you live from Austin, Texas, it’s May here. The heat is starting to get a little hotter and I’ll tell you, the sun is hot. The barbecue is sweet and all the drinks are absolutely free.
If you come over here with me, that’s what I’m talking about. I want to share with you today what I call the seven Ps of really taking a look at your business. I don’t know about you, but what happens for me is I have parts of the business or in the business and I find out that I have a broken club or a broken store or a broken studio. And I always ask myself, what is it exactly that’s broken from that particular studio.
But I have my seven Ps that I’ve learned through the years about how to take a look at that business and how to try to make it better. So what I want to do is share with you those seven Ps, and I’ll give you a couple of illustrations, but if you have a piece of paper, just write one through seven and then we’re gonna make some notes and you can ask yourself some of these questions.
The first P if you have a broken business or something’s not working, take a look at the product, and be specific about it. If you’re a retail business, it could be your facility, that product. iIf you’re in the fitness business, it could be the actual classes, the templates, and the coaches, or that the workout is not exactly as it should be. It could be a product. It could be your messaging. It could be your actual facade, it could be your sign. It could be a number of things, but take a look at what exactly is your product. You’ve got to take a look at your product and find out what’s working. What’s not working? What’s in disrepair? What needs attention? What needs focus? But one of the first ways to fix a business is to look at the physical product.
Second one is look at your pricing and you want to take a look at what’s happening with your pricing. What’s happening? Are your prices competitive? Are your prices higher than your competitors? Are they lower than your competitors? Do you have the right options? Jeffrey Gitomer says “The best people hate to be sold, but they love to buy.” How do you get people to buy you? You give them options, right? Pricing could also include payment methods. Do you have ACH? Do you accept all forms of credit cards? Uh, do you have terms that can all be part of your price?
The third P is people, do you have the right team in place? And usually what I ask people on this is, have you ever had a dream? You have, fantastic. Tell me what is the profile of a dream team? Who are those people and what did they do? Take a look at your existing team and go, what should these people be doing to present themselves? The dream team.
Well, that guy that was my top sales guy, man. He was really outgoing. He was always setting more appointments than required. He was always friendly and he made tons of friends and he got a ton of referrals. He was really relatable. But you gotta take a look at your people and you gotta ask yourself, are they helping? Or are they not? Most people either have to lead, follow, or get out of the way. You’ve got to take a look at your people. You’ve got to rank your people top to bottom. What do the top people have that the bottom people do not have?
Then write it down and then train and teach those people that don’t have it. You find out if your people are unwilling or unable. If they are unwilling, you have to make a seat adjustment and move them on. If they are unable, you gotta spend a little bit more time training, teaching, coaching, those particular people, but people are a big piece of the program.
The fourth P is pay. What are people really getting paid in? Are you paying a competitive compensation or salary as your competitors are paying? We don’t have to pay them. We certainly don’t want to pay the least. What we want is a competitive pay for employees and what you find out today, you know, ever since we came out of COVID, it’s really hard to find the right number of employees. And it’s hard to find employees that can do the job, but I guarantee you, if we can’t find them and you won’t be able to find them either.
The fifth P is process. Do you have a step-by-step process for different parts of your business? Do you have a step-by-step process about how people find you and your business? Do you have a step by step process about how you capture or collect names and contacts? Do you have a step-by-step process for sales? What’s the first thing you do? What’s the second thing you do? What’s the third thing you do?
If you have a cleaning company, do you have a process for cleaning? What’s the first thing we do? What’s the second thing we do? What’s the third thing we do? With cleaning, most people don’t really know how to. We assume everybody learned that when we were kids and growing up, but the reality is most people don’t really know how to clean and clean well and clean in detail. It’s about corners. It’s about edges, but do you have a step-by-step process? This is the cleaning solution we use. This is our cleaning cloth. Are they rags? Are they mops? Are they paper towels? What is it exactly that you’re using to do the cleaning? You need to have a process.
The sixth P is promotion. Promotion really is all about marketing. Are you doing online promotion? Are you doing a traditional media promotion? Are you doing promotion belly to belly, nose to nose, and toes to toes. Are you doing event promotion? Are you doing referral promotion? What are the kinds of promotions? And do you have the collateral material in order to produce in order to promote, in order to get the word out there?
Are you using the right megaphone? Sometimes you’re doing the right thing, but you’re not using a big enough voice or a big enough megaphone and you’re not talking to people. Remember, this is usually a numbers game, but you got to talk to more people. Are you doing the right promotions?
And finally, the last one is what I call programs. So programs in my fitness business are things like activities we do or use to drive usage. And we have things like hell week. It’s seven weeks of workouts. You work on all seven days of the week and you get a hell week t-shirt or hell week mug, whatever it is. But in reality, it is a program.
So do you have referral programs? Do you have usage programs? Do you have promotion programs? Do you have a loyalty, a member or a customer loyalty program? What are the programs that really facilitate either member engagement, customer engagement, or really focus on increasing usage? Is there kind of a value add for your customers so that when they think about doing business with anyone they do it with you?
They love the program. They love the people. They love the product, they love the price. And therefore they do business with you. Seven Ps to take a look at your business and evaluate it, how to become better or how to fix a broken business.
See you next Tuesday.