Our Biggest System FAILs with Mark Fisher

[00:00:00] Hello, my friend on today’s episode, Mark Fisher and I are talking about some of our big fails when it comes to building systems in our businesses. We talk a lot on this podcast about the importance of building systems in your business. So we talked today about times when it went wrong, times when things got too complicated and how to get back to simple and effective systems.

So if you also struggle to build simple and effective systems, come listen to our failures so you can learn from our example, keep on listening, my friend.

Welcome to the Business for Unicorns podcast, where we help gym and studio owners create a business and a life they love. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me and the Business for Unicorns team each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym.

Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn. In the fitness industry,[00:01:00] 

hello, fitness, business nerds. What’s up. Welcome to another episode of the business unicorns podcast. Before we jump into today’s episode, I want to give you a quick reminder that we have a ton of free tools and templates and resources on our website. And there’s one in particular that we think is absolutely fantastic, which is a temp template for how and when to raise your rates.

As a gym owner, you should be raising your rates with your clients. Every year, and we know that can be a really difficult process for some of you, if not all of you. So we made a really simple straightforward template that includes a templated email for you to just copy and paste to your clients. So if you have not raised your rates in a while because you’re a little stressed about it, that’s very normal.

Just go get this resource, click the link down below in the show notes, go get it. It’s free and go raise your rates next week. Well, which brings us to today’s episode of Mr. Fisher, how are you? [00:02:00] I am doing pretty good. How’s your 2025 so far? We’re recording this mid February. How’s 2025 shaping up for you?

It’s going good. I’m, I must confess. I feel like I work in six week sprints and this was the week where I was like, Oh, now I’m getting like tired, but I don’t have a, uh, nothing. I think I’ve just been doing the same thing too many weeks. There’s been like no travel and no disruption. I’ve been so regimented, which is great.

I just think I’m ready to shake it up. But as it happens, I’m going to South Africa in 10 days. So fun. Very different. That’s exciting. How long will you be there? I forget. I think a little over a week, a little over a week. Have you been before? Yeah. I have never been. No. I’m very excited. Yeah. So fun. I haven’t been either.

I’m excited to hear what you have to say about it. Yeah. Excited. I have a trip coming up this week, which is decidedly less adventurous and sexy place, but I’m going on a family, funny enough, a family trip to Las Vegas. Oh, that’s a wholesome place. Yeah. But my in laws really love the band, the Eagles, and they’re playing at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Right. So husband Andrew and I are taking them to go see the Eagles. Which [00:03:00] I’d like the Eagles hotel, California. It’s not my favorite, but I also really wanted to see the sphere. And so that’ll be a fun trip, but I really think of Vegas when I think of family trips. And so it’ll be a fun one. I actually have a trip already for the Real Coaches Summit.

Check out Real Coaches Summit, 2023. com in April. But then it was a last minute arranged bachelor party, which I’m frankly terrified for, but don’t do anything. Don’t need to do anything I don’t want to do, but. Yeah. I feel in my ears, both titillated and terrified. I love it. That’s a good place to be.

That’s a good place to be. Let’s talk about today’s topic, which is all about building systems, which we talk about a lot on this podcast, because it’s really the kind of cornerstone of building any business is the systems that run this business. But today we want to talk about and give some examples of times when our systems got away from us, where our systems became too complicated.

Too burdensome and really want to stress throughout this episode, the importance of keeping systems [00:04:00] simple, which is something you and I can both admit right here on this podcast. We’ve struggled with over the years for many reasons. I’ll speak for myself and say, I make systems too complicated for many reasons that I think some of which are like, I like complicated things.

I like the brain puzzle of complicated things. I like the challenge of complicated things. And what I’ve learned over the years is that the hardest thing to do is not to make a complicated system, but the hardest thing to do is make a simple system that actually can manage through complicated situations.

So let’s just go through maybe a few examples of times when we really fucked this up and why it’s so important. Where do you want to start Fisher? Yeah, I’ll talk about one thing that is a little bit of a mea culpa, because I know over the years people have looked to what we have done in Mark Fisher Fitness, and there’s a lot that we’ve done that they should model, right?

Two particular systems come to mind. One was we had a education program for our trainers called the Unicorn Curriculum, and it was very impressive looking. It was very impressive. Google docs that were [00:05:00] like really impressive templates. And I remember I used to show this at events. So if I was giving a talk on like leadership and people run to the back of the room to get links, to roll out their own version of the unicorn curriculum.

And it was well intentioned, but in retrospect, it was just like a lot of work to oversee. I think it was like the right idea of like, what do you do each quarter to get better? And. If I’m remembering, it’s been a while, to be fair. We learned there are ways several years ago at this point, but I think there was like individual visioning every quarter they were supposed to do and share with their manager, and then they were supposed to identify either on their own or with our help, what were they going to do that quarter to move the ball forward and to the defense of that program, I think one of the things that there’s no perfect solve for any.

State demanded community or like education thing is invariably if you’re forcing people to do anything, you’re robbing them of some autonomy and some agency, and I don’t think there’s actually, I’m curious if you have a hot take on this from the academy, I’m not sure there’s actually like a perfect solve because it’s like.

You either don’t make them do anything and they can [00:06:00] choose their own education and absolutely vast majority of people will do absolutely nothing, or you can build in some accountability and give them some real support and social pressure to do a thing, but invariably you’re taking away some of the natural impetus that people might have because now it’s no longer as freely chosen.

I think the We were definitely the latter camp program and it was well intentioned. I think the potential takeaway here, which we’ll probably just keep reading this podcast is in the beginning. You don’t have any systems. That’s the problem, right? A lot of people, they hire us. They say, I need systems and you’re right.

You have no systems. That’s bad. This, the second part of the tunnel that maybe is not as commonly discussed is your systems are bad. You’ve made the system, but it’s so complicated and unwieldy. It’s not clear. Well, exactly how to use it. It’s onerous for everybody to fulfill. And we’ve unfortunately for better for us had a real luxury to make really complicated systems because MFF is, was such a animal, particularly at its peak.

We had the largest staff in the history of the world, which is not a brag. That’s a confession to be clear. [00:07:00] So. At any rate, that’s an example of one that got really out of hand. And yeah, there’s probably simpler ways to get some of the social pressure without quite the administrative cost. Yeah, I think that’s it.

I think whenever you have a system that takes so much just to run, takes so much energy to keep the momentum going, you got to pause and say, Is there an easier way? I think the other thing you’re pointing out there, I think rightfully so is that a system that is meant that is trying to get some people to do things that they don’t maybe intrinsically want to do also has to be super simple.

And if you want your team to undergo continued education on a regular basis, and while there’s some people on the team who are going to be stoked to do that, no matter how you roll it out, there’s going to be probably a majority of people who have some friction there. And it’s actually making me think of, have you ever read the book, The Friction Project?

Do you know that one, Fisher? No. No, I think it’s been out for a few years, but it was really all about, I’ll, I’ll try and think of the author’s names. It was two authors. I think that one of them was like Sutton, I think, but anyway, go Google it, friends. The Friction Project, author [00:08:00] Sutton, and it was all about how to make, It, how to make the right things easier and the wrong things harder, which is something that we hear from our friends at Zingerman’s all the time, right?

You want to practice to, so it’s easy to get right and hard to get wrong. And the same mentality applies to systems, right? Is that our job often as leaders and managers is to remove friction from the process, right? And the more frictionless, the easier it is for everyone to just follow along and get it right.

And the harder it is for them to get it wrong. And I think that. System, the unicorn curriculum was a good example of we created so many layers of steps that it was really hard to get, like, they really had to pay attention and read the instructions and do multiple steps instead of something that just made it really seamless for them just to keep learning.

Uh, and I think you’re right that the balance is a little between, you know, asking and telling, right? There’s some, you know, there’s something about just. Telling them what to do, which is maybe a little bit easier sometimes versus asking, which inherently has more permutations, but I think there’s something there, but we went so far in one direction [00:09:00] and we reined it in.

We think we found some other versions eventually that were a little bit easier. But I think that a big red flag is it’s hard for everyone to get this right, because it’s complicated. This takes a lot of time and energy to keep moving and, and the process itself just has friction and it doesn’t feel. Uh, smooth and easy to do and remember.

And those, I think all those flags were present in that system. Yes. Yeah. Yes. What other ones have we done over the years that looking back feels like that was unwieldy? Oh yeah. So here’s another one. And this is funny. Somebody came in here and said, I just post about this as a Facebook or the other version of this.

And I was like, ah, You, it’s okay to do this, but let me warn you from your future. We had a program called Founders Club, which was my genius idea because I was reading a lot about loyalty programs and thinking, okay, how do we really create more customer service? And again, the idea in theory was general.

There’s probably like a lighter version of it, which is probably doable. Lighter versions, probably. Track your members attendance and give them a t shirt when they come in a hundred times. Or not even a t shirt. T shirts are hard because you need [00:10:00] sizes, but give them a nice tote bag or something that’s like unisex and not size dependent.

That’s probably for most of you. Yeah. You should probably do that. And then the SOPs, you take a picture and you put on social media. That’s your whole loyalty program. We, however, and a lot of this again, came out of a good place. I often joke slash I’m not joking. I am particularly, I am particularly at the effect of law of reciprocity.

I feel very uncomfortable when people, I feel indebted, right? Clients can really use me to your advantage here because they so badly want you to win. I’ll cry if you don’t, I’m obsessed with it. And MFF, this was also around time where it was dawning on me. It was like Some of these people have spent 75, 000 of this business.

It feels a little weird that we’re not acknowledging that they’ve spent. Now there’s people that have truly spent over a hundred thousand dollars in the business, which I know a lot of you’re like, what? Yep. And that felt very weird not to acknowledge it, but rather than just do something simple, we created like a three tiered thing.

And there was like. Gold level and rainbow and platinum. And then each of those tiers had a different set of things that you [00:11:00] would get, and then it wound up being very, actually challenging in mind by a line to not just, it was just not just one or two things. You’ve got like five, six things. There were multiple things.

And again, like points for creativity points for intention, but here’s the other thing too. The real cost of all these programs is you do them. They don’t know. You can always nudge retention. Yeah. So you’re doing it thinking like, Oh, this will really change the thing. But in fact, all we did was just create an opportunity to disappoint people when it’s somebody got overlooked or like we, the administrative staff of our cast of thousands was overwhelmed in a given month doing who knows what else.

So they didn’t get around to doing it. And then people are like, I didn’t get my thing. My suggestion, in addition to the good, just keep it simple, is Please understand, I’m not rejecting the claim that a lot of these customer service systems are not going to move the ball forward, right? To be very clear, but like these days, I’m like, there’s like a handful of things I think probably every gym probably should do and they’re all like damn simple and they’re not Elaborate tracking spreadsheets of [00:12:00] how many times they came in with an elaborate set of different tiers and benefits.

And so, yeah, anybody that’s looked at MFS founders club, I’d be like, Oh, I want to do that because it looks so good on paper and it was so unwieldy to roll out and I’m not. Clear did really anything again. It’s a lot of people don’t appreciate, but I’m just, I can’t show you with any data that that move the ball forward, which if I can mention briefly before, I’m sure you’ll have many thoughts too about that program.

That’s probably another thing we want to be doing. If we’re going to do an intervention or like our whole model, we think about like gyms is all out one system at a time per month, one on one with your coach, fix the thing. And then yes, your subjective sense does matter, but what is the data that you’re hoping to change with the system you’re rolling out?

Because otherwise you can really get a nasty habit of doing a lot of things that seem nice to have, but you don’t really have any data suggests it’s actually doing anything. And now we’re confusing activity with achievement. Hey there, business unicorns, podcast listeners. I’m just making absolutely sure you have already gotten your [00:13:00] free instantly downloadable copy of my new book.

The little book of gym marketing secrets. You can find a link to download it in the show notes or you can go to gym marketing secrets book. com I worked super hard to make sure this is a less than a 30 minute read and as a comprehensive overview of all the things you need to do to grow your gym, get more leads, more clients, and importantly, change more lives.

Again, find the link in the show notes where you can download your free copy at gym marketing secrets book. com and now back to the podcast. Yeah, 100%. I think that’s the takeaway from that one for sure. For me, I think all of our good intentions and creativity and desire to be inclusive of our clients and give them so much value we got, it got lost in the sauce that what we’re trying to do is improve retention.

And we threw all these ideas out there, and because we threw so many out there, it was impossible to test what was actually working. So I think when you go to take on a new project, even if one has to be somewhat complicated, you want to make sure you stay grounded in what are the results we’re hoping to achieve.[00:14:00] 

How are we going to measure success here? How are we going to know it’s working? And all too often when you’re running any sort of study, any sort of scientific study, you really have to control the variables. And if you start running a process or a system in your business that has a million and one variables, you’ll never know which of those variables are working for you or not.

All right. So you’re way better off to start way simpler and test, experiment, find out how the actual variables move the needle. And if you need more complexity, you can always add it. But I think starting simpler allows you to actually figure out, okay, if I do X, does it result in Y? If not, let’s try another different X and see if it results in Y until we actually can move the needle on the thing we want to change.

But I think we just threw the whole kitchen sink at it and it was impossible to reverse engineer from there. Is this making a difference? And if so, which of these 900 things that we’re doing is the thing that made the difference? We’ll never know. There was too many. So I think that connection to results is so critical and it’s hard.

It’s because it’s not obvious. And [00:15:00] you can’t always do it right. And that’s the thing too. It’s like, particularly with long tail things like retention, retention, it’s so very hard to be like, Oh, we did this. And then retention proved X, right? Like it’s very hard tracking stuff. So to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t do anything if you don’t have evidence for it.

I think it’s okay sometimes to say, yep, this is not a huge lift logistically. It’s pretty simple. It’s reasonable to believe this will improve people’s experience. And I won’t be able to prove exactly the retention increased X because of the community event that we did, but optimally at the very least make it simple and if possible, at least put some thought into what might be some data points we’d look at to understand if this is having the impact we want.

Yeah, because the reality is that if you’re going to do community events or loyalty program to try to improve retention and you do some stuff and you have no evidence that it’s impacting retention at all, you really do have to ask yourself, is this worth doing in the first place? Yeah. You really at least sit with that question, right?

Cause it might have some other ancillary benefits, right? Having community [00:16:00] events with your clients might just improve the nature of your relationships overall, or be more fun for your team. Or like there might be other cool things. Goal was to improve retention and you can’t find any evidence that’s working.

You want to, at some point just be like, okay, do we want to keep doing this? It’s okay to stop if, if you want to. Cause the real cost is opportunity cost. That’s all the other things that you could do, which by the way, including not limited to just zone out and actually take a damn break and not get burnt out and don’t think about your work.

And that is very hard because I think the final point I’ll make about this is it’s also way easier. In some sense to add the system, then take away the system, right? So once you’ve created the thing and now it’s asymmetrical, it’s a lot harder to get rid of it once you set the expectation that a certain thing is going to happen.

So I would be real careful adding permanent new evergreen systems that you haven’t tested that you think are going to move the ball forward because they don’t always do it. And then it’s. I go on the face if you try to pull it back. Yeah. I think [00:17:00] we’ve been a self inflicted victim of that kind of sunk cost bias so many times.

And so once you’ve created a system that’s so big and cumbersome and your team spent a whole quarter, it was one of our quarterly projects and we roll it out. Then the mere thought of putting it to bed, it just feels like such a. gut punch. So you just don’t even consider it. And that’s real. So I think Fisher’s you’re spot on here, which is start slow, run the minimum viable product first, right?

Create, start with the smallest possible thing before you put in all the work to make something big and complex. And then you can always make it bigger and more complex, but start small. Yeah. Anything else to say on this? I think this is, this is, I think a good topic. No, just I’m sorry for anybody listening is, Oh, wait, I did founders club and it didn’t work.

And I thought I was doing it wrong. I was like, Nope, it was a dumb idea. Yeah. We should end this with just anyone who worked at MFF and we’ve spared you from other ones like the, our Sherpa program, which was again, the right idea and check ins by the way, I think are coming back. We should do some [00:18:00] content on check ins.

I know I keep nudging you to create the momentum coaching playbook for unicorn society. It’s halfway done. It’s halfway done. Yeah. Because I think like one on one coaching, like laser target check ins, I do think is very valuable. And I do think you can make a case like that changes, particularly in a group format that changes the relationship with it.

We did a previous version of it, which was the right idea, but just didn’t really the Sherpa program where everybody on the team had like how many ninjas that we just had. We had so many team members and we had so many clients or like sending people on like vacations, like all expense paid vacations for referral projects, but they didn’t seem to necessarily move the ball to getting referrals.

And people like didn’t even take pictures about our gym. They’re just like, okay, thanks. But people we loved actually took a lot of big swings took a lot of big swings, learned our big lessons, which. Gives us something to talk about on this podcast. It’s true. That’s true. My mistakes are, our mistakes are for your benefit.

Awesome. Dear friends to wrap things up. Just another quick reminder that we have so many fun free tools, templates, and resources on our [00:19:00] website. If you haven’t raised your rates in a while, go grab the raise your rate template. It’s free for immediate download on our website. Click the link down below in the show notes.

Thanks again for a great conversation, Fisher. I’ll see you on the next one. Bye.