Storytelling, Systems, and Success with Sahil Bloom

[00:00:00] 1, 2, 3, 4. Welcome to The Business for Unicorns podcast, where we help gym and [00:00:10] 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 [00:00:20] 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.[00:00:30]

Welcome to The Business for Unicorns podcast. I am Pete [00:00:40] DePue, back to host another episode. This time I’m joined by actually what is now becoming one of my longest term friends. Sahil Bloom. Sahil [00:00:50] Counts himself. As one of the day, one guys at Cresty Sports Performance literally executed a training session as I put together equipment on the side of the room.[00:01:00]

So he is a CSP OG since that time, back in 2007. He’s done a lot of shit. So Sahil is an entrepreneur. [00:01:10] Former private equity guy, right? A recently New York Times bestselling author and somebody who’s got way too big of an audience to be participating in a business [00:01:20] unicorns podcast. But these are the things we do for old friends, right?

S most importantly is a husband and father and his little guy, Roman is how old [00:01:30] now? About three. Yeah, 3-year-old. So he has a lot of the. Same experiences as me as far as family, and growing up in this area goes and we have shared [00:01:40] hundreds, if not a thousand training sessions, it seems like over the years.

And that’s what we’re gonna do after we record. But today we are gonna get into his [00:01:50] take on gym ownership ’cause he has seen a ton of it. And believe it or not, a couple of guys, myself included in his tight social circle are gym owners. And [00:02:00] so he has a strangely informed take on this stuff. And welcome to your first Business Unicorns Podcast.

Podcast. Thank you. I feel like strangely informed is a [00:02:10] good phrase for me in a lot of random areas of life. My, my weird curiosity about things has led me to be strangely informed about a random assortment of topics. Gym [00:02:20] ownership actually probably is one of them. You’re right, yeah. You’ve seen every iteration of CSP.

You were there for the real hole in the wall one. You were there. [00:02:30] As we jumped into our first, what I would call more professional looking space, and you’re right here watching, having conversations with me right now as I prepare to move our gym for the first [00:02:40] time in 17 years, and I’m sure you’ll challenge a lot of the assumptions I’m making about the process, and I will take stuff away from that.

Today I wanna stick with our [00:02:50] typical format. We’re gonna go real short. These are 15 to 20 minute episodes. I like to hit three quick questions. In this case, I’ve definitely tailored them to match what you’re known for [00:03:00] as far as your content strategy goes. And we can give five minutes or so to each sound.

Good. Sounds great. Alright, cool. So you’ve built a massive platform over a million person [00:03:10] audience on what I would say is primarily storytelling, and I think that us small business owners, gym owners specifically. Could do a better job of [00:03:20] using storytelling to connect with our audience. And I want to know if you were running CSP today, or any, let’s say, gen Pop gym, [00:03:30] in this case, not necessarily performance training.

Mm-hmm. Like trying to get tons of high school or college athletes in, you’re just running a fitness studio. Where do you feel like US gym owners are missing the [00:03:40] opportunity to leverage storytelling in our social media? I think that ultimately what you’re trying to solve for is trust. Like when I think of [00:03:50] content and social media as a business driver and as a business lever, I think where people, the biggest mistake people make is that they focus on [00:04:00] the wrong metrics.

So you’re focusing on views, likes, followers, et cetera. When the truth is that the atomic unit of success [00:04:10] is trust. If you’re trying to build a business in the real world, social media is a vector of creating scale trust with people. That then leads to the actual [00:04:20] business outcome that you’re trying to generate, which is people showing up at your gym, paying you for the service that you’re providing.

The importance of that is hard to overstate [00:04:30] because you do things completely differently if you’re trying to engender trust versus if you’re trying to engender followers, likes, views, et cetera. If you’re trying to just chase the vanity [00:04:40] metrics, you’re gonna just do the growth hacky things that might be able to get you that, which is a completely different strategy than saying, okay.

What I’m actually trying to do is build trust. What do I want to do to build trust? What creates [00:04:50] trust in a normal, in-person relationship is the same as what it create, as what creates it in an online that is gonna be things like authenticity. It’s gonna be journey based, probably where people feel [00:05:00] like they’re actually along for the ride with you on the path that you’re taking.

And it’s gonna be natural, it’s gonna be raw. It’s not gonna be performative in that way, which sort of ties to authenticity. I think that is the [00:05:10] most important thing for any gym owner to think about today. So it’s to say, okay. I’m trying to make sure that I’m creating trust with every single thing that comes across.

I need to do that [00:05:20] via creating real value for the people. So if someone’s watching something from me, it can’t just be this like, oh, I put together a hype reel of some random thing. This is like with podcasts. It [00:05:30] drives me nuts. Every podcast you go on. They want to post some like hype trailer that’s like these little clips that come together to make a trailer for the podcast, but there’s no value to the [00:05:40] person watching that, right?

A person watches it. Maybe if they’re an enormous fan of you, they get excited, but for the most part, there’s no value actually being passed along. You have to think about if you were on the other side of this [00:05:50] transaction, which. Social media is a transaction by, there’s no way around this, right? Someone is giving you their time and attention, and you are giving them something that hopefully gives them [00:06:00] value for that time and attention.

If you are breaking that, you are not engendering trust. So you need to think about, okay, what can I be putting out into the world on a consistent basis that is going to [00:06:10] create this value that the other person is then gonna keep coming back to me for? Keep gifting me their time and attention. That builds trust over a period of time, which leads to more business in the real world.

I think that [00:06:20] what that actually means tactically is. Creating things that feel like they’re really part of the journey. So someone running a gym. If I were running a gym, [00:06:30] I would be creating content probably across a couple of different pillars. Like I would sit down and think with a whiteboard, what are the few different pillars that I can take people on a journey around for [00:06:40] this gym?

One is probably the business side of this gym. Hey, I’m going and creating this new facility. I’m really nervous about it. Here’s like exactly how I had to go find this [00:06:50] lease. Here are the things that I’m having to negotiate around it. Here’s what’s important to me with the space. Here’s how I’m going in building it.

Here’s what I’m scared about with that. Imposter syndrome, all of those things, really sharing the journey. [00:07:00] There’s probably one that’s like client storytelling where you’re really like talking about the things you’re doing with different clients, how you’re going and building this thing out, and then there’s probably just like a personal side [00:07:10] of like you as a human being, as a gym owner outside of the business.

And it’s like your values and the core of who you are authentically sharing those things. I think across those three [00:07:20] areas, you’re going to create a feeling of authenticity, a feeling of value that you’re putting out with all of these things, that you’re gonna attract that trust, and you’re gonna build that trust over a period [00:07:30] of time.

That’s going to lead to greater community, greater loyalty, and the people more referrals. All of those things are gonna follow at the end of the day. The number one core principle [00:07:40] here with any content you put out, anything you’re doing around storytelling is if you were on the other side of this, would it be valuable?

I, I do not look at the performance of [00:07:50] any of my posts. My team at the end of a week pulls together like a digest now where we’ll look and try to like come up with trends and perspectives on what we can change, what we can [00:08:00] edit. But for me, the reason I don’t look is because I don’t want to be swayed by the algorithm around what I feel is valuable or not.

I want to feel like, okay, if I am confident [00:08:10] that this is going to create value for a younger version of myself that might be on the other end of this, or for an older version of myself on the other end of this. Then I want to put it out into the world and it’s fine to me if I put something out [00:08:20] that I feel is valuable and it only gets a thousand views versus a million, I thought that was pretty valuable actually, and whoever watches that, I actually think they’re gonna get value from [00:08:30] it.

I can feel good about it. When I don’t feel good is when I’m trying to like play little games and hack the system and you put something out and it’s garbage and it does well, but you’re like, [00:08:40] ah, that was nonsense. Like that wasn’t a real, that wasn’t a real picture of what it is to run a gym or what it is to write a book or whatever it is that you’re trying to share around.

Okay, so [00:08:50] awesome answer, which could be a whole podcast in and of itself. I particularly like the trust piece. We did our quarterly planning for business unicorns yesterday. And Mark Fisher [00:09:00] actually leaned hard on this trust piece, specifically emphasizing that we want to collect content as it relates to trust that we built with our community for [00:09:10] future reels, things of that nature.

And the shortsighted problem that I have with it is just, I don’t know how to tie any objective. Metrics [00:09:20] to the performance of that content, just to know like, all right, we’re on the right path. So I agree with you that the trust game is the one we should be playing, but it’s super long term. So [00:09:30] how long do you suggest the gym owner trust that is the right path forward?

Because it’s gonna take a little while before it starts showing results for us, be it through social [00:09:40] or in the form of foot traffic in our gym. How do you trust the process if you’re us? I think that you do get a pretty clear and fast response from the market, quote [00:09:50] unquote, if things actually have value or not.

Like I see a lot of business owners on Instagram as an example or wherever, but Instagram’s probably the primary one for me. [00:10:00] Putting out content that it clearly doesn’t click for whatever reason, it’s just not working. The way you’re sharing it, people aren’t getting value from it. Everyone wants to point to the algorithm.

They’re like, I don’t get reach [00:10:10] anymore. I don’t get this and that. Usually when you put out stuff that’s really valuable, it gets eyeballs. Like the algorithms are actually quite good. I try to just say. There’s like this meme of the person [00:10:20] staring in the mirror and like pointing at themselves and it’s your shadow band on one side pointing in the mirror, and then the other side is your content just sucks pointing back at you.

And I’ve often sent [00:10:30] that to our team when their team is, oh, I don’t know why this didn’t perform. So it probably just wasn’t that good. I, I have had very few instances and five years of doing this where I felt like I put legitimate, concerted, incredible [00:10:40] effort into something and it didn’t get the eyeballs I feel like it deserves.

So the point of that is to say. Yes. Trust is the thing you need to be focusing on. Trust is a byproduct of value that [00:10:50] you’re continuing to put out into the world. You get a pretty quick market response on whether the type and the format and the way that you’re structuring it is creating the value that you hope it does.[00:11:00]

You can go ask five people that won’t bullshit you on these things too, and they’ll tell you, like if you came to me and you were like, Hey, we’re trying this new content series that’s around player storytelling and how they’re [00:11:10] like coming in and training for the off season. We did these five interviews and we put them up.

They didn’t really work. Are they good? Do you actually find these valuable? And I could pretty quickly tell you, and I won’t, I’ll be honest with you. [00:11:20] Hey, this is why it doesn’t seem like it’s working. I don’t really get quickly to the point of what the value in this video is gonna be. You have to on all these platforms.

You have three [00:11:30] seconds to make sure that the person doesn’t keep scrolling. So first off, you have to like make sure that you front load somehow what I’m gonna get out of this video and what the exact value is and go from there. [00:11:40] But I really do think that you can pretty quickly get a perspective on.

Whether or not the angle you were taking, the angle of approach is, is actually creating [00:11:50] value for people on the other side of that transaction. Yeah, they, one of my favorite content filters in my world is our group text thread. Yeah. Where if one of us puts something up that we think is stupid, [00:12:00] will’s gonna talk some trash on the other end and tell us it.

Yeah. You need some truth tellers in your life in that way. Right? Like it’s And grit. Has been glamorized in a lot of [00:12:10] ways, societally of, oh, you just stick to it. Just keep pounding your head into a wall. Like Mr. Beast made 10,000 videos before he broke through, and it’s just like, it’s nonsense because [00:12:20] what it ignores is the.

Enormous amount of iteration that actually goes in under the surface on all those overnight success stories of 10 years. Everyone’s like, oh, it took 10 [00:12:30] years to be an overnight success, so I just need to work for 10 years pounding my head into a wall, and then I’ll be an overnight success. First off, that’s not how it works.

That’s survivorship bias. Second off, those people [00:12:40] maniacally, iterated under the surface, every single rep that went out to get a little bit better at the thing over and over again. So. If you’re not doing that, if you’re not asking the [00:12:50] question, being like, okay, what could have been different? Here I am, my team gets driven nuts with stuff, with content with me, where I’ll be like, Hey, they’ll put together this thing, and I’m like, can you just [00:13:00] shrink the font a tiny bit?

So that one word is on the same line as that other one, because I look at it and yes, probably 99.9% of people don’t care. But it drives me [00:13:10] nuts. Like I, there’s tiny things that I personally think might make a little bit of difference and over a long period of time, you need to be, you need to at least approach it [00:13:20] like you were trying to be a master at that craft.

Every time in every domain where I’ve spent time with the people that are at the top of their craft, did a podcast with Chris Williamson a couple months ago. He is a friend of mine. I’d [00:13:30] never done a podcast with him. I know him really well, and I know he takes it very seriously. But we sat there like waiting to start for 30 minutes while he made the most tiny edits [00:13:40] with his video person, to how the shots were set up of us sitting in what was already a professional studio and set up of him being like, oh, the lighting this Zoom in here.

It’s a little off. [00:13:50] Like it was these tiny things that I would, I was sitting there, this is absurd. Why are we sitting here doing this? But it’s that level of. Of obsession over the [00:14:00] craft that is required in a really competitive environment. Sure. Okay. Awesome. I have two more questions that are, the answer are important to me ’cause this is [00:14:10] all just selfish and I wanna make sure I hit it with you.

The second one is, most of US fitness entrepreneurs hit a ceiling because we just try and do everything. And quite [00:14:20] simply, I wanna know, what’s the first system or process that you’d encourage us gym owners to use to. Put it in place to buy back our time. [00:14:30] I would, I would do an audit of all of the things that you currently put your time towards during the course of a week.

Take your [00:14:40] calendar at the end of a week and just look at it and try to apply like a leverage score to all of the different activities from the week. I sometimes talk about this as [00:14:50] energy. You’re like things that created energy for you versus drained. That’s another way to do it. You make green, be creating energy, red be draining, and then look at the calendar and figure out what’s creating versus draining [00:15:00] energy.

I think a leverage score is another way to think about that, to say, what are the highest leverage things you can be spending time on as a business owner? Like what is the one unit of input that [00:15:10] creates 10 units of output versus the one to one? Things like answering phone calls and replying to baseline FAQ.

Client or [00:15:20] prospective client questions is probably one-to-one. Going and doing like a community event where you’re speaking to the value of the thing that you’ve built in the community is [00:15:30] probably one to 10, where you’re like, yeah, you put in the same hour and I might generate 10 prospective clients versus this like one-to-one traits.

Do that kind of mapping exercise and then zoom out [00:15:40] and just go to a coffee shop with a blank sheet of paper and that calendar and sit down and just brainstorm the ways that you might be able to delegate or remove a lot of those one-to-one [00:15:50] trades. The initial response from every especially small business owner is like, I just have to do those things.

There’s often ways that you can remove them. Frankly. [00:16:00] Now you can hire an overseas executive assistant or virtual assistant for a few thousand dollars a month, and people are like, that’s a lot for my small business. What I would encourage you to ask [00:16:10] is, okay, if you got that. Let’s say it’s five, 10 hours a week that you’re currently spending on those things, and you’re gonna be able to outsource that over a period of two to three months to someone that you’re paying three grand a month [00:16:20] to.

What could you do with that five to 10 hours a week? And if you could put that five to 10 hours a week, take three of those hours and put it towards these high leverage activities, and then the rest, you could [00:16:30] spend time with your family, you might make more revenue on the back of that, more margin and have more time for your family as a result of this one.

Initiative that you took. The principle here is just you always [00:16:40] wanna look for the highest leverage, the highest point of leverage in any given system, and just put your energy towards that. For me, it’s taken me four years to figure this out, that [00:16:50] like the highest leverage use of my time is creative.

It’s creative work. I shouldn’t be spending time on sponsorships. I shouldn’t be spending time on negotiating contracts. I shouldn’t be spending time on literally anything [00:17:00] other than doing creative work and spending time with people. For me, like for our whole business, everything that I do, everything follows that.

Me spending time on anything else [00:17:10] generally is a bad use of time. Relative to what generates revenue, what drives the business forward, what creates the value for everything else, and so it’s taken us a while to then build out systems around [00:17:20] that. But it all came from identifying, okay, what is the place where if I tap on the flywheel, it just keeps getting faster and faster versus me like slogging away, pushing this thing [00:17:30] alongside all of my other team members.

If you think of it, the reason you and I are friends is because Eric came to this conclusion in 2006 and he reached out to me and he is, I’m starting to gym. [00:17:40] Do you want to do it? And I said, I’m not a fitness professional. I haven’t finished my MBA yet. I have no idea where I bring value. And he is, I don’t wanna respond to any more scheduling emails, swipe credit [00:17:50] cards, or worry about who’s going to get our internet and phone set up in the new space.

And he’s like, all I should be doing is writing articles for T Nation and making sure that people know that I know stuff about [00:18:00] shoulders and. I don’t know if he was quite so intentional about coming to that conclusion, but he definitely decided to set the business back by bringing in someone [00:18:10] who’s not actually going to coach any athletes, draw a salary against it and know that short term, yeah, it’s gonna hurt our profitability, but long term we’re gonna have a business [00:18:20] guy who’s gonna free him up from doing what you’ve just described as one-to-one stuff.

And I had never heard it put that way, but it’s perfect. And I’ll tell you that my wife texted me. A, I think it was a [00:18:30] LinkedIn video, but it was something of you explaining your energy audit as far as the calendar goes. And she didn’t write anything in it. She just sent the video and I wrote back to her, this was like in the last 48 [00:18:40] hours.

I was like, I don’t know if you are making fun of Sawhill right now or telling me you like this. And she goes, yeah, I probably should answered that. I’m going to do this for the next two weeks. I want your [00:18:50] support in assessing my calendar. Mm-hmm. ’cause she’s just gassed with work, but it’s just reaching so many different people in so many different markets.

Okay. Awesome answer. Last question for you, and [00:19:00] this one’s important to me as well. You went from private equity to entrepreneur, to content creator, influencer, we’ll call it bestselling author, all of these things, [00:19:10] and that’s a lot of identity shifts and the people who listen to this podcast and the people we work with in business, unicorns are trying to get away from being the technician in their [00:19:20] space and trying to hire a bunch of technicians and just free up the time by back the time you’re talking about.

But I think the thing they struggle with most is shifting from coach to business leader [00:19:30] and how their identity just wholesale changes when they do it. So I’m wondering what you learned in the last five years about reinventing yourself that they can apply. I don’t believe that [00:19:40] there’s any real reason to attach your identity to things that you are doing professionally.

This is [00:19:50] like fairly, but it’s, I impossible not to. It’s so hard. Yeah. I just, I don’t think you are not, you are ever changing in everything that you do. Like we all like to talk about growth mindset. To me, growth mindset is just about the idea [00:20:00] that like you’re a fluid being and if you like there, there is someone out there significantly less talented than you [00:20:10] doing the thing that you want to do, living the life that you want, simply because they were less self-conscious and they just went and did it and.

Every [00:20:20] step along my journey when I was like, oh, I can’t really do that. I don’t know how to run a business, or I’m not an entrepreneur until like a year ago, I wouldn’t have called myself an entrepreneur. I was like, no, an entrepreneur like does these [00:20:30] other things. And my wife was like, aren’t you running a business?

Don’t you have employees? Don’t you like, then you’re an entrepreneur. And it was just in my mind that I’m not an entrepreneur. I was like, no, I’m doing these other, I’m doing [00:20:40] these random things. It’s, it’s, there’s so much self labeling that goes on in your head and. Self labeling can be really harmful.

’cause it creates this whole narrative in your [00:20:50] mind about who you are, what you’re capable of, what you should be doing, what you aren’t doing, et cetera. And it’s even, oh, I’m an introvert. Okay, now you’re gonna act like an introvert. Whether or not you [00:21:00] actually are, you’re gonna just, your behavior is going to align with this story, this label that you’ve given yourself.

And I just would say you can reinvent yourself anytime you want. And the way [00:21:10] that you do it is by taking. Action. You could go and actually do something if you aren’t an entrepreneur now, you can be an entrepreneur tomorrow by just going and starting to take action and starting to do things to build something.[00:21:20]

And so I would just ground everything in your life around action. Don’t feel like you need to p apply labels to it. You don’t need to be anything that [00:21:30] anyone else says. You can just start going and moving, and the answers you seek in life are found in the actions you avoid. So go and take action and good things happen.

[00:21:40] Awesome. All right, we’re gonna kill it there and go out and get into the gym and get a training session in. Thank you for the time as always, and I am certain people are gonna ask you to come back so you can expect [00:21:50] that in your text message thread. Look forward to it.[00:22:00] [00:22:10]

Go, go, go.