Geez, There’s a Lot to Learn

The year was 2010. I had finished the first draft of my book, Ignite the Fire. First drafts of anything aren’t good – and Ignite was no exception. Still, I decided to ask a business coach for marketing help. His response:

“Uhh, sure Jon, I’ll help you turn your book into an Ebook and market it. Umm, it’ll be, uhh, be $10,000.”

I said no and spent my money on a fabulous editor instead. Next, I invested a lot of time to learn how to market the book myself.

8 years later and the book has been translated to Chinese and Spanish and has sold tens of thousands of copies. I’d say that I made the right choice.

While I’ll never know for certain, I’m reasonably confident that if I had turned the first draft of Ignite into a shoddy Ebook and sold it, I’d have maybe made a bit of money and fizzled out. I wouldn’t have such a great business today, and you would never have heard of me.

That early experience taught me one thing:

I was on my own.

If I was going to forge my own path, produce great work, and develop an audience wanting to buy from me all while operating with the highest integrity, then it was up to me.

In Monday’s email I said,

“Your success is up to you, and the skills you’re able to acquire.”

In Monday’s email I also said,

“When it comes to your career, life, and business, the #1 person responsible— the only person responsible—is always the one looking at you in the mirror. No magical mentor is going to float down on his flying unicorn and sprinkle his success dust all over your face and everything will be pretty and perfect with a fairy-tale happy ending.”

In 8 years I’ve never hired a coach or paid for a mentor. Instead, I committed to acquiring the skills needed to succeed. I took responsibility. Now, I’m not saying that spending thousands on coaching or mentoring is a bad thing, but I’m proud to have done what I’ve done alone. Not only that, going it alone has also had some very important unintended advantages.

If You Want to Have More, You Need to Think Differently

You need to deeply understand the problem – what you want to achieve.

You need to know yourself.

You need to forge your own path.

And the only way to do these things is to internalize the game that we’re all playing and acquire the skills yourself.

I learned a long time ago that the best way to acquire the skills was a dedication to self-study and imperfect action. Committing to spending thousands on a coach or mentor that may or may not actually know what he or she was talking about would have set me back more than push me forward.

Here’s an excerpt from the Fitness Business Lifestyle Revolution Manual, a brand-new 74-page guide only available as a bonus gift when you subscribe to our Fitness Marketing Monthly service on June 12th:

Here are some cold, hard facts:

• True success, pleasure, and fulfillment without delay are not possible.
• Nothing worth having can be had overnight.
• Nothing worth having can be had without dedication and without work.

These statements have always been true and always will be. But that’s not the story we’re told these days.

The cocaine high of whatever happened on social media ten minutes ago, the assumption of same-day shipping, and the ability to find any information within seconds through a device that fits in a pocket have given people unrealistic expectations of what it takes to become successful. They want it all, and they want it now.

–Nothing worth having can be had overnight.

Figuring out Facebook advertising isn’t the solution. Gaming the ever-changing algorithms isn’t the solution. And spending thousands on a mentor to learn how they send out a FB ad –> application form –> sales call is certainly not the solution.

The solution is for you to learn how to:

• ACHIEVE MORE in less time with the efficiency habits of the pros,
• Confidently sell with greater ease by understanding customer psychology,
• Make more per client, keep people longer, and cut your customer acquisition costs by utilizing clever customer retention and referral methods, and . . .

. . . understanding pricing so that you can charge what you’re worth, writing compelling advertising and high-converting advertisements, and improving your financial literacy so that you can keep more of what you make come tax time.

And this just scratches the surface.

If all of this seems overwhelming then don’t worry – you are in the majority. As I said, nothing worth having can be achieved overnight. Acquiring all of these skills takes time. Once you establish a baseline in them a new world of opportunity will open to you. The fitness industry is one of the most profitable in the world, and you deserve a piece of the pie.

There’s a lot to Learn

I feel that the reason why so many turn to pricey mentoring is not because coaches have figured out all of the answers (hint: they haven’t) but because the coach will tell them what to do. What fit pros are buying when they spend thousands of dollars on a coach is not information, it’s permission to take action.

So what if, I wondered a few years back, there could be a way to deliver the information from a carefully curated selection of the world’s best fitness business experts, and package this information in a way that it elicited action without the $2,000+ price tag?

What if there was a way to compile everything a forward-thinking fit pro needed to know about business and marketing development in an exclusive dossier delivered to their doorstep via priority mail once a month?

What if there was a way to do all this while simultaneously eliminating the noise, only including trusted sources, and selling it for less than the cost of your daily coffee?

Tall task. And it took a lot of time to put the pieces together. But I’ve done it for you, because I think that it’s what you’ve been missing. What I’m describing is our brand new service that’s going to be available for charter member subscriptions on June 12th called Fitness Marketing Monthly (FMM).

The goal of FMM is simple:

Our hand-picked contributors deliver to you precisely what you need to know so that when you’re finished with each issue, you can turn the page and rest easy, confident in what you learned, ready to apply.

Printing and shipping this valuable service to you each month as opposed to sending it to you digitally means two things:

• You won’t be distracted by your computer or phone and can give it your full focus – no more Internet rabbit holes.
• When you’ve finished reading it, you flip the final page and have permission to take action – It has finality you’re sorely missing when working online.

Fitness Marketing Monthly gives you the focus, the clarity, and the edge you need to dramatically advance your business, step by step, action by action, every single day. So you aren’t always starting over, or shifting gears, or lying awake at night feeling overwhelmed and wondering what more you can do.

I hope that you join us on June 12th.

-Coach Jon

P.S. None of this is to say that business coaching and mentoring is a bad decision – they just aren’t magical. If you already work with a coach that you’re happy with then that’s great! FMM will be a valuable supplement to whatever you’re working on, not a replacement.

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This article originally appeared on OnlineTrainer.com