Michael and Ben Beg You to Keep it Simple

Speaker: [00:00:00] Hello my friend. If you’re a gym owner listening to this podcast, there’s one thing I absolutely know to be true about you, which is you probably want more leads and more clients for your gym. I mean, what gym owner doesn’t. So if you want that, you’ll wanna get a free copy of our free book. It’s our Little Book of Gym Marketing Secrets.

It’s honestly the book we all wish we had when we first opened our gyms. It’s, it’s really a zero fluff guide you can read in less than 30 minutes. And it covers everything you know to grow and market your [00:00:30] gym. To get instant access to your free copy, click the link below in the show notes and download it right now.

You’ll be glad you did. 1, 2, 3, 4. 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 unicorns team each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym.[00:01:00]

Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business Unicorns podcast. Today I’m back, back, back again with Ben Pickard. What’s up Mr. Pickard?

Speaker 2: Hello. Hello.

Speaker: It, it’s so good to see you. I feel like we probably haven’t had an episode come out with the two of us in a hot minute.

Have, have we?

Speaker 2: [00:01:30] I don’t think we have. I did one with Pete.

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: we did one a few weeks ago.

Speaker: It’s been a lot of episodes without me at the beginning of this year. ’cause I was away and so it’s nice to be back on the podcast again with you, sir.

Speaker 2: A hundred percent,

Speaker: yeah. How’s your, we’re recording this at the beginning of February, so how’s, how’s your January or 2026 been so far?

Speaker 2: Honestly, pretty good. I’ve been working on. Well, as you know, trying to delegate more effectively to my GM and just continuing to lean into the trust that I’ve built with her. We really product quarterly planning. [00:02:00] We have a shitload of fucking snow here. My God.

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: and I just got back from the spa, which was

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker 2: A relatively new experience. Dear listeners, if you know me and the list of things you think I like spa is probably not on top of that list. It turns out. I don’t dislike spas.

Speaker: Yeah. Good for you. It’s, it opens up a whole new world of, of self pampering and, and listen. Hot clo, hot plunge, cold plunge, wet sauna, dry sauna, steam rooms, massages.

It’s like there’s a lot to like there, [00:02:30] honestly. There’s a lot to like, that’s nice. You know, good for you. I’m glad you’re opening up your, your world to new, new forms of self-care and pampering.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker: Well, let’s dive into today’s episode. Today we were recording. We have time to record, kinda a short episode today and thought, okay, well what can we record today?

Those need to be kind of a short and spicy and so. Here’s our topic, and maybe I’ll introduce it in maybe a not so spicy way to get things rolling, and then we can turn up the heat. But I think it was the beginning of last year, correct me if I’m wrong. Beginning of last year we were doing a [00:03:00] review of our values at business unicorns, like our internal kind of company values.

And it might even been the year before. Forgive me, I don’t have, I don’t remember what ti the timeline was, but relatively recently, last year or two, we. Updated our values and we included one that was not never a value before. That has been really aspirational for us and really has changed a lot of our thinking.

So the value that we added to our internal company values is simplicity. And part of the reason we added that is that all of us have had our own experience been [00:03:30] running his, his business. Mark and I at Mark Fisher Fitness and beyond have really experienced the pain of making things too complicated many times, complicated SOPs, complicated decision making, complicated services for our, our clients.

Just we really all. Came together and were like, well what is that pain point? That pain point was, we make things too fucking complicated. What’s the value that then can address this pain point? Well, how about we embrace simplicity? What if we really put simplicity front and center to our decision [00:04:00] making?

And lemme tell you all I can tell you from on behalf of Ben and Mark, the rest of the team and I, that has been a great decision. And a hard one. It’s been real tough to really put everything to the lens of, is this as simple as it can fucking be? Ben, speak a little bit to that. What’s been your experience so far of trying to like hold ourselves to the standard?

Speaker 2: I think you articulated it well. If it comes to the question of like, is this as simple as it can possibly be? I don’t know, nine outta 10 times. The answer we have is like, fucking no, not even close.

Speaker: Yes, [00:04:30] yes.

Speaker 2: But the fact that we’re keeping it top of mind and we are making more and more decisions. Through that lens.

We don’t always follow it. I will say, hence the word aspirational value. Yeah. Which we’re getting from the person we hired to help us do this. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean it hasn’t been influential. It helps us like, you know, how do we, how do we help members? You know, we recently moved every, we had everything in two softwares now as our members, well now everything’s one software.

It’s awesome. It’s way simpler. It’s way better. But there’s other times [00:05:00] where. I would say another value we have is excellence, where our commitment to the best possible version of it and our commitment to the simplest possible version of it are sometimes.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Two different version and there’s a real, I think, a healthy friction between those two things.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s, that’s well said. And I think that’s, that’s a, I think that’s something that our values should represent is kind of the contradiction and the tension in the kind of dueling things that we want. Right. Oftentimes, the goals that we have are, are contrary to one. You know, they, [00:05:30] they fight, they work with together sometimes, but they fight against each other sometimes too.

I think having that tension between wanting to be both excellent and keep things really freaking simple, that’s a really useful tension. Like, I’ll, I’ll live with that tension all day long and, and, and it’s been really fun and aspirational for us. But what we wanted to do is actually in today’s episode, we want to riff on that value of simplicity and maybe just do a, maybe it’s a little bit of a rant.

I have plenty of things I can say here, but I thought I maybe just share some, a list of things we see gym owners do. That are the opposite of [00:06:00] simple, right? There’s a lot of very common mistakes we see gym owners make every day that we talk to them that are really just so not simple. Now that we’re looking at it from this lens, it’s very easy for us to see, oh God, no wonder you’re so frustrated.

What you just described to me is so complicated. How do we help you make it more simple? And so this simplicity lens, we’ve also tried to apply to our help with our work with Unicorn center members and clients. So. Let’s maybe Ben, maybe I’ll, I’ll make you go first ’cause I know I already have a hundred things I can list.

But maybe I’ll start [00:06:30] with one thing you’ve seen gym owners do that is really kind of counter to this, this vision of running a simple, efficient business.

Speaker 2: Wait, the first one I mentioned, it just, we were kind of brainstorming. This is adding ancillary services such as nutrition coaching.

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker 2: And I’m guilty of this.

We just lost nutrition coaching in the fall. Yes. And we sold it out and we’re just launch about to launch it again in like, I don’t know, next week or the week after. And there’s a piece of me that like, no one’s gonna buy this. It’s a waste of our damn time. We made, yes, we made a profit on it, but like it’s, it’s [00:07:00] kind of an inconsequential amount of money.

In the grand scheme of things, we would’ve made more profit if we just signed up one member for a year, probably.

Speaker: Yep.

Speaker 2: And it’s just, Ooh, my, a few members mentioned that we should have blah. Should we have blah, I’m gonna make a program around blah. Who do I talk to? He goes, blah. Well. Don’t, just don’t, just cut that out.

Speaker: Don’t do blah, don’t do blah. Don’t do, blah. I, I think, yeah, this is one of, you’re right, this is one of the ones I could talk a lot about, but most gyms should have one, maybe two [00:07:30] services. That’s it. Period. Right. And it’s because if you want to be the best in your market at. The thing that you do best, you can’t do 20 things right?

Gyms who have this idea that you’re gonna be this kind of one-stop shop for everything. I never see that work. Please, someone in the comments below, type below a gym that has been highly profitable for years and runs efficiently as a one stop shop for a million services. I’ll [00:08:00] wait, but I don’t know them.

I haven’t, I haven’t come up with them. Right. I’m sure they’re, they’re, they’re anomalies. Right. But, but on the whole, that is a losing strategy. Right. And the things I see most common, you’re right. Nutrition coaching. Online or remote training. Too much merchandise in the space. You know, ancillary kinds of coaching on the side bootcamp programs and, hello, mark and I were so guilty of this one snatch in six weeks.

We had for, you know, 13 years at Mark Fisher Fitness and, and you know, in some ways I’m really [00:08:30] grateful for that program. But also it added so much complexity to our business. We always said if we could start over again, we probably wouldn’t have had it. We’ve had a very different trajectory, but still, we probably wouldn’t have had it if we had it to start all over again.

And, and I, I’ve filled on this podcast before I met my husband in that program. So that says, that says a lot. I still wanna meet you, Andrew. I still wanna meet him, but you know, but it just added so much complexity. So bootcamps goes on that list. Recovery services. I mean, there’s a ton of folks at Unicorn [00:09:00] Society told to me, you know, we just bought, we’re just gonna, we’re opening up this whole new section of our gym and we’re gonna put all this recovery stuff in it.

I’m like, why? Why? Who? No one is gonna pay you lots of money per month to go use that, that leg compress machine or the, the cold, that cold plunge that no one is gonna be spending a lot of money on that. Anyway, I could call wrong. I’ve

Speaker 2: always been curious with recovery stuff. Like gyms are really easy to maintain from a hygienic perspective.

Like sure, basic cleaning of the bathroom in the gym [00:09:30] and like you’re kind of good to go.

Speaker: Yeah. A

Speaker 2: fucking cold. Am I gonna get in a bathtub that some other sweaty individual, like I, I genuinely wanna know as a consumer, what’s your cleaning procedure for this?

Speaker: Yeah. Listen, I think the, the only exceptions I’ll make here is that if you are in a facility that partners with physical therapists and you have a thriving physical therapy practice that’s part of your gym, maybe you need some of this kind of recovery style equipment or this therapeutic clinical style equipment maybe.

Right. But in that case, the physical therapies business should really be paying for most of it. Same thing with other kind of [00:10:00] recovery things like if you really work with pretty serious athletes, I’m not talking about high school athletes college or semi-pro or pro athletes. You might need some like real special amenities for to attract and keep them, but that’s not most of you listening to this.

So I think this is a really good place to start the list, Ben, which is, you know, most of you have just too many services you should do. Most of you should probably do small group personal training, and then either large group. Or one-on-one training as your second option. And, and that’s it. End, you know, period, end of story.

[00:10:30] And you know, some of you on the list on, on the, on the listening also to sports performance, you might have an adult and a sports performance side of your business. That’s even more reason to keep it simple, right? If you already are working with kind of two really separate avatars, really wanna offer one service to each two if you have to, right?

But you can see how, you know, the more complicated you make it. The less profitable it tends to be. Right? Complicated systems, complicated businesses are often just less profitable Ones complication, [00:11:00] you know, complexity is expensive. More people involved, more decisions to make. You know, and from a marketing perspective, when it comes to your surfaces, we know in marketing, when you confuse, you lose.

And so if it’s not clear what services you’re best at, what you really do as a consumer, which one should I choose for myself? When you do one thing, guess what? That’s what I’m coming to you for because you’re the best in town at that one thing.

Speaker 2: And may I might have a, this might be a useful lens to think of adding services so that it makes it easier to say no.[00:11:30]

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: I know y’all probably don’t have a lineup of people kicking down your door to become a member, and you’re so popular that you can say no to everybody and you’ve got a legitimate wait list.

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: and I mean, this is the math I did, even though I still pulled the trigger on the nutrition program. It took up two weeks of marketing emails to our entire list because we, we’d made them different, but members, former members and prospects all got marketed this.

Speaker: Yep.

Speaker 2: So that was the thing we marketed that month to those people. We had to bring on someone to do it. We had to make SOPs, we had to get a [00:12:00] frigging app, we had to do all this shit. And like the question you wanna ask yourself is how many more clients would this equate to? Mm-hmm. Now, I know every time you send an email, you don’t necessarily get a client.

So there’s like a little bit of an incongruency here, but if the answer is like two more clients who stay for whatever your normal attrition, like length of, length of engagement is. Yeah. Like if they typically stay for two or three years and they pay you $300 a month. And that’s like a $7,000 over two years client be like, we’d be better off just doing our normal thing and getting another client, [00:12:30] or should make this whole other thing that like three people said they wanted, but they probably weren’t gonna pay for it.

’cause nobody knows what they want or says what they think.

Speaker: Yeah, I think it’s a really good rubric, Ben, just to say, okay, if we’re gonna try anything new, let’s compare it to how much money could we make on that reasonably even, you know, do a best middle, worst case scenario. Let’s compare that to a best middle, worst case scenario.

If we just spent a little more time and money on marketing our core service. And if spending more time and money and effort marketing, your core service would get you farther faster, please pick that [00:13:00] every time, please. And that’s almost always the case. If you just got a few more of clients doing the core service that you’re good at, it almost always will make you more money than all these peripheral things we’re talking about.

And so, yeah, Bravo. I think that’s a really good kind of heuristic for how to think about this. What else is on the list? Where else do we wanna go? There’s so many other things that people make overly complicated. I’m trying to pick one. Do you, do you have another one in mind?

Speaker 2: Maybe like payroll and scheduling and hiring?

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: I mean, [00:13:30] not everybody’s an offender here.

Speaker: Yeah, I

Speaker 2: find a strong word. I apologize.

Speaker: Offender. Well, let me, let me just go into this one. ’cause I think maybe these, these touch the same thing. I was gonna say program design.

Speaker 2: Ooh, that’s a good one too.

Speaker: This is one that I think almost everyone is a offender of.

And listen, I wanna be the first to say I’m not a personal trainer. I don’t have a training certification. Never have, never will, right? So let me just say, I’m coming at this as like, you know, as a, like, really well educated muggle here, right? Like I, I don’t have the magic powers of being a personal trainer, but I [00:14:00] know enough.

To to know that, say this confidently, is that as, as you know, as much as all of you out there, really many of you founded your gym because you have a real love of training, a real love of fitness, of biomechanics, of watching people’s moving bodies and helping them move better. Like there’s a real art to that.

There’s a real science to that. I really. Respect and appreciate the craft more than anyone. As someone who used to be a, a dancer, a massage therapist, there’s nothing I love more than people who really appreciate the complexity of the human moving [00:14:30] body and wanna analyze it and study it and help make it better.

And most of you run gyms that are for gen pop folks. Most of you run gyms for, and I’ll speak to, you know, specifically as Americans. Most Americans who need a gym to come work out with, and they need pretty basic meat and potatoes exercises. They need pretty basic programming where they’re gonna do a little of all the pattern, a little pushing, a little pulling, a little squatting, a little hinging.

They’re gonna get their heart rate up, they’re gonna leave in 45, [00:15:00] 55 minutes having gotten a pretty good workout and not hurt themselves. And that does not require. Incredibly complex and advanced programming, and I know that’s disappointing to a lot of trainers out there, especially people who are real nerds about it and really wish they could be working for the NFL.

And if that’s the case, don’t make your processes overly complicated just because it’s fun for you, because it just doesn’t scale and you know you, it’s fine when you’re the one doing all the programming as, as you know, you’re a first year gym owner, but the minute you have to hire staff and [00:15:30] teach them how to do it.

Teach ’em how to follow your systems and at one point delegate your systems over to them. Then all that complex stuff you were doing in the beginning, ’cause it was just kind of fun for you, it starts to break down. It doesn’t scale when you need other people to learn how to do it. And so at some point you gotta, you know, you gotta kill your darlings and make your program design as simple as possible so that it can scale.

And I think, you know, really simple programming can be really effective for general population folks. And I say general population because I know that sometimes in sports performance there’s some [00:16:00] extra special care and attention that’s required for training people on certain performance outcomes. But by and large, most of you listening are serving like, you know.

Regular Mr. And Mrs. Smiths out there in the world and they don’t need much, they don’t need complicated programming. They, everyone doesn’t need their own individual, you know, snowflake program. Right? Like, they don’t need something that’s so unique to them that no one else in the room is doing anything else the same.

Right? And just, it’s so much complexity and. As a trainer, Ben, tell me here am I, am I missing something? Am [00:16:30] I wrong about this one?

Speaker 2: I, I, you know, it actually paints

Speaker: me. You’re, you’re as nerdy as it gets when it comes to programming and, and training. Like you’re a real nerd.

Speaker 2: There. There was a time when I was nerdier than I am now.

I’m kind of back there. I’m back to the fundamentals at this point, but I mean, that’s the arc. Mm-hmm. It’s I Kruger effect. The more you think, you know, the, like, there’s, it’s bad. It’s usually the opposite, you know?

Speaker: It’s the opposite. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And. There’s very few things that I know for like true certainty, like true with a capital [00:17:00] T.

A lot of it is like, this seems to work or this person does that. And you make a really good point with, because we have a passion and a nerdiness with it and a desire, and we like at this moment really love it. And we may assume that we’re going to love it forever, but I didn’t. We do the thing that’s much different than what’s actually best for that person.

And even I still, 11, we just had our 11th anniversary a couple days ago for my job. Wow. There’s still times where I’m like, shit, I’m pro that. That’s what I would do, not what Sue would do. Susar, avatar.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: So I get caught up in that. [00:17:30] So yeah, we’re still learning more and more about the human body and the complexity, as you mentioned within it, and.

It. The body still also seems to follow really simple principles, like we need to do a progressive overload. We need to do specific adaptation to impose demand. I don’t know if we need to do a lot of the other stuff out there, if it’s just like a cool thing that maybe has some benefit of keeping our clients engaged, but probably isn’t worth the amount of complexity that we’re adding, and there’s probably a really easier other way to keep your [00:18:00] clients engaged with that thing.

And I mean, here I am for the lifting nerds in the room. After 17 years of lifting, I’ve been doing 5, 3, 1 for the past three years and getting the best gains. The best value in terms of like progress and not getting hurt and not being beat up and not being sore so I can live my life. I read about 5, 3, 1 fucking 12 years ago from Jim Wendler and I’m like, this isn’t complicated enough to work.

And now I’m like, God damn, this is effective.

Speaker: Well, I think that’s, that’s exactly the core of like our whole point of this ranting podcast is like, that’s what we want you all to [00:18:30] do is ask yourself the question, what is the minimum effective dose for this thing to be successful and work? Right. Can I design programming that’s based on some really fundamental, basic strategies like this five through one.

I don’t even know what the fuck that is, but like I imagine you do five and then do three, and then you do one.

Speaker 2: Give or take. Yeah.

Speaker: Okay, great. I nailed it. But like, you know, that’s the question, right? Regardless of what the topic is in your business, whether it’s program design or marketing or you name it, any of those other SOPs that we were gonna talk about, the question we want you all to, [00:19:00] to we’re begging you to ask is you.

Are you making the simplest version that is also effective? And there’s no right or wrong answer to all that for all of you. You have to decide for yourself what’s best for you, your business, your team, your clients, right? But we we’re just begging you to ask the question, is there a way to do this that’s simpler?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I bet. I bet you for a lot of you, there’s a lot of clients who. Would actually benefit from you Just finding a way for them to come a third or fourth time per week, depending how much they come now than to like fancy pants. The hell outta the two or [00:19:30] maybe three days a week they come. I’m making some assumptions here.

It’s like, like sometimes the problem is I did a thing where I was trying to, trying to get my overhead press up. I have a lifetime goal of overhead pressing my body weight, which I just think is badass as hell. So like barbell press, the downside is I get stronger, I keep gaining weight. So there’s this like.

I gotta keep getting stronger. That’s beside the point. So I talked to a bunch of unicorn side of people. ’cause I got all these fitness nerds. I’m like, what would you do if you were in my shoes? And the answer was like, yeah, I think you just got overhead. Press more. Maybe do some more heavy singles. And I’m like, huh.

Here we [00:20:00] go. You know, and Mickey had some good points about, you know, from some shoulder stuff. My shoulder was bugging me.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And it was like, right, the, the answer was, I need to increase the intensity and I need to increase the volume. There was no magic programming thing. It was just, I need to be more, I mean, like

Speaker: literally some of the best programming minds in the country we have access to.

And they were like. Ben just lift more weights. Like

Speaker 2: literally what one of them said, I’m like, okay, good. I do that and it’s important.

Speaker: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think that, I think that’s, you know, that’s the kind of, that’s the kind of overall message here you were about earlier to message me, message [00:20:30] to talk about a few other kind of places where people overcomplicate things.

I think that you were talking generally about kind of SOPs.

Speaker 2: I was thinking like kind of staff and payroll and how you handle that actually. But yeah, SOP is another good one.

Speaker: Yeah. Talk about the payroll part. I think that’s probably one other one. I would be on my list.

Speaker 2: Probably every three to four weeks we get a, a question about like, how should I pay my staff?

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And you know, there’s ways where it’s like, especially in small or large group, they get a base pay plus a price per head, which I don’t think is terrible. And it’s like you pay them for admin [00:21:00] rate for this and sales rate for that, and they get commissioned for this. And it’s like, I don’t know. I, I know there’s different ways to do it, but I have a hard time thinking about like hourly rate for coaching.

Stipend for everything else, and be a good manager and do the math on what that stipend would actually be. So you’re not inadvertently taking advantage of your people, which nobody on this podcast wants to do. And at the same time, you’re not inadvertently being like four times more generous than you intend to do in your stipend, just thousands and thousands of dollars that they’re not doing the work.

Like keep it simple. Some people come into coaching and they wanna. [00:21:30] Mostly coach and they’ll be possibly reluctantly willing to do a little bit of admin because a fitness professional knows it’s more than just what happens on the floor. That gives people results and other people are like, I want this to be, I wanna be the manager.

And for most of the coaches, I think we hire, I think they wanna have some sort of upwards growth. And a lot of them really just like, you know what? I love coaching and I wanna just mostly coach. And then they have this, they get commissioned for this and pay rate for that and this for this other thing and this third thing here.

And even they don’t know what they get paid until the end of the month through the [00:22:00] pay period.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: It’s like keep it simple and if, Hey, here’s how we do it here. If you have any questions about. Happy to chat.

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: super simple.

Speaker: I think that’s a really good one because I think all too often, you know, we, we create an approach to paying people based on each individual.

We’re like, oh, well this person does this and this for me, so I’m gonna pay them this way and this person does this and this for me. I’m gonna pay them this way. And it becomes this big change mass when the reality is, is really want like the most simple way to pay everyone in a way that’s like fair and like the easiest to everyone, [00:22:30] for everyone to calculate.

I think you know, a good a. Test might be for you. Like if I asked you to explain to me how your trainers get paid and what it takes you longer than about 60 seconds. It’s probably too complicated.

Speaker 2: 15 seconds. It’s too complicated.

Speaker: 30 seconds probably is too. So yeah, it’s too complicated. And then sometimes we ask people that question and like, you know, 20 minutes in, I still don’t understand how they do it, you know, and that’s not a judgment, it’s just like to say like, that’s too much y’all, that’s too complicated.

So I think, you know, the, the recommendation we make for most of the people, most of the [00:23:00] time. When it comes to paying trainers is exactly what Ben said, which is they have on the floor rate for the time when they’re on the floor and they have off the floor rate and that off the floor rate. Often we combine into like a, a monthly or per pay period stipend just to make it even simpler.

So it’s just one flat rate they get in their paycheck, and so that’s simple. I can easily explain to a trainer, yeah, we’re on the floor. You make x hundred dollars per hour, and then when you’re off the floor you get paid this blanket amount of money every time in your paycheck for accomplishing this checklist of things.

It’s very simple and you’re, you know, all of you [00:23:30] out there. Yours might look slightly different, but we want it to be that simple so it scales. So when we add more employees, we’re not adding on this complex process that I can’t even explain during my onboarding very easily. And then trainers have to like, go and make some fancy spreadsheet to figure out what am I even making this pay period.

You know, it’s just, it’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. It’s not

Speaker 2: worth it at all.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: I have

Speaker: a, alright, we could keep going, but, oh, you have one more? I have

Speaker 2: hypothesis to end on.

Speaker: Oh, cool. If it’s okay

Speaker 2: with you,

Speaker: please.

Speaker 2: So this is coming to me as during this conversation. I [00:24:00] suspect that for most of us, myself included, with the amount of complexity we built, and I think this applies to BFU, to bring this full circle.

Speaker: Great.

Speaker 2: We make it complexity because of a deep, intrinsic commitment to. Excellence or some pseudonym for excellence, that even if it’s not listed on our core values, it’s a core value for us. We usually open to gym because we love training and we love due to whatever. We wanna share that gift with everybody we know because it changed our lives.

And then because of that, we’re optimizing for what is the best [00:24:30] rather than what is the best for my business or for my avatar.

Speaker: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: So a really quick aside, I have a friend who’s potentially opening an installation business like, hmm. Houses are being built. He comes in, you got a giant vacuum blower thing, you blow insulation in the attic, you leave.

If I was opening an insulation business, if I’m like, what’s a good insulation? Who’s gonna install the insulation? How do I market installation services? It’s, I don’t really give a shit about insulation. I need it, but I’m not like, oh my God. Let me tell you about our new insulation. [00:25:00] Yeah. But because there’s such training and fitness nerds, we go so over the top.

And I just wanna like maybe a little bit tongue in cheek here, say. If that really lights you up, go for it. Like if this truly is your passion and you think you’re gonna love it 10 years from now, which I know everyone changes what they want, like it’s not wrong to add ancillary services or make complicated trainer or pay

Speaker: Sure

Speaker 2: or do anything.

Just know that that has a cost. And for most of you, that cost is going to be. You’re just gonna [00:25:30] make less money, have less stress, and work more hours. But if that’s worth it to you because like this is what you live and breathe like, there’s nothing wrong with that. Somebody is the best in the world because they absolutely nerd it out on that one thing.

And when the apocalypse comes, they’re the person who gets called. And it’s like a Hollywood movie for most of us who wanna have like a really robust business that we can feel good about what we’re doing and still take time off and see our kids. I don’t think it works so well. And there’s this, I’m listening to this podcast series that I’m really enjoying and they had a fancy term for it that’ll lose me, but it’s, we usually don’t project [00:26:00] accurately what we think the future is going to look like because we don’t give enough details to it.

Speaker: Sure.

Speaker 2: I launched programming at one point in my life. I still think it’s cool, but after writing my teen program from Teen Thousandths program, I don’t know. I’m just like, I’m kind of getting tired of this.

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: so the build business you want today and the business you want five years from now are probably gonna be a little bit different.

And I think it, it’s a lot to ask, but it’s necessary to think, what do you want your life to look like up down that road? Yeah. If you want to be like the Eric Cressey, follow that path, but go hire a business dude. You need a Pete. [00:26:30]

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: If you see yourself actually stepping back from the business in the next five to 10 years, build a business that you can step back from.

And that means you gotta make it simpler.

Speaker: Yeah, I think that’s a really great, great point Ben. And I think it’s like maybe a good lesson to, like a good exercise to leave our listeners with is that you know, you really wanna think about the long term you, when you’re thinking about building your business and the systems you put into your business, you, when you build the business for the future business, you want not for your.

Current needs, I mean, need to address your current needs, but your sy, your system should be forward looking. [00:27:00] Your systems should be future proof as much as possible, right? We don’t have crystal balls, but you know what you want your future business to be. And if you want certain systems in your business to be scalable to, you know, if you want certain systems in your business to be delegatable, if you want certain systems in your business to be run by other people entirely, at some point they need to be simple enough to scale.

And as Ben said, it’s not the wrong choice to make something not scalable. Just make it consciously knowing that there are trade-offs. Make it, make that decision. Consciously knowing I am making a version of this [00:27:30] that’s not gonna scale, but that’s okay. ’cause I’m super passionate about nutrition coaching and I’m always gonna be the one that does it.

And I’m never gonna let anyone else do that because it’s my thing and I’m gonna make a really unscalable version ’cause it’s fun for me. Cool. Go off. But make that decision consciously. And I think what we pointed out here today is most of you are, most of, you’re making things complex. Even though you want it to be simple, you want it to be scalable.

And so. Think about your future self when you’re building these businesses. And if you’re looking for ultimate scale and simplicity, think about that when [00:28:00] you’re building your next systems and we’re here to help. We’re here to help you do that. Alright, well thanks for a great conversation, Ben. This was fun.

And even though it was a short, spicy rant, I think there’s hopefully some good takeaways from folks. Um, that was. Yeah. But, but yeah, listen, we mean, it, it’s, it’s one of our core values for a reason, right? Simplicity, I think is, is actually key to a lot of success. It’s key to profitability, it’s key to scalability.

It’s, it’s key to freedom, which we care a lot about as entrepreneurs. And so, so I hope that you all are taking away that this, we’re not just, we’re not just mad at you. [00:28:30] We actually are rooting for you, and we hope you’ll embrace this value along with us. Yeah,

Speaker 2: please. Yeah.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, thanks Ben. Well, thanks for a great conversation and I’ll see you all the next one.

Have a kick ass day. Bye.

Speaker 2: Thank you. You too.

You [00:29:00] go.