Why Everything in Life is About Fighting Change

The original title for this blog was going to be something about a day in the life of a consultant and what we all can learn from a typical day’s worth of calls that I do whenever I am in town. Even as I wrote the first sentence I found myself bored.

But as I started to look at the themes from all of my calls during the last few weeks, a pattern started to emerge. Virtually every call out of 30 could all be broken down into one theme: an owner’s inability to accept rapid change and then move on. Each problem was not a problem of business, but an underneath issue of an owner who was fighting change that was being inflicted in his business by outside forces.

There was a book out a few years ago called, "It is not the big that eat the small, it is the fast that eat the slow,” by Jennings and Haughton, that seems to become more relevant every day. In small business, and especially our industry, change is occurring at the most rapid rate in the entire history of the industry and few owners and managers are geared toward managing and adapting to this change.

Here are a few of the reasons accepting change is so hard for so many:

• Many were lucky rather than good: Being first in a market, owning a great location, owning a new concept or just being the only option in the market might make you wealthy, but it never proved you were any good at this business. Increased competition always validates one thing: you either have talent or you were the luckiest bastard on the planet. Many are lucky, few are good operators when the pressure arrives and you realize that you never really understood how to make money in your business.

• Some were indeed successful once, with tools that suited that time and era: There were owners who mastered the draw box (card board boxes in cheap restaurants where you enter and win a trip and everyone else gets two weeks to the gym/everyone won the two weeks and got called for an appointment), the pressure close in an office, discount marketing and price specials and other tools from the 60s-80s that were used to make money in this business.

An owner using these tools now would die a quick and horrible death in this business, but I still occasionally take a call from one of the old players that usually begins, "I just can’t find good people to work for me anymore. I know more about making money in this business than anyone else and I used to be somebody in the 80s when I had my 10 clubs, but you just can’t get anyone to do the work it takes anymore to be successful.”

What this really means is that he can’t hire anyone who can be successful at making cold calls, working draw boxes, beating clients up for referrals and drop closing (showing one price and then showing a much lower one if you sign today and today only); because no employee wants to do work that is embarrassing and ineffective. This old owner does not know more about making money than anyone else…he knew more about making money than anyone else back in the day when all that demeaning crap might have worked and being successful back in the day is absolutely no indicator that anything you did will even work five years later.

• Failure to adapt one more time: In the Anne Rice vampire books most vampires only lived about 400 years because they just could not keep adapting to newer and ever more complex societies. They overloaded and just quit living versus the pain of adapting to the new and different technology and culture they were forced to live with each decade.

There is an enormous number of owners who would qualify as vampires when it comes to change; although you can work in the blood sucking jokes here if you would like to reference a few of the big chains. How we market now electronically versus old radio and newspaper ads, how we sell through extended trials versus one visit pressure and especially how we train people moving away from technology that hasn’t worked successfully for a client in decades toward a holistic, total body approach is just too much for too many owners and managers. They only know what they knew, but don’t know what they need.

Simply put; most just refuse to take the time to learn or keep up. The operative word here is lazy, as in lazy in the mind and body. Yes, you would have to admit you don’t have all the answers if you want to grow, and yes you would have to pay someone to help you either as a consultant or tutor, but in the end you still have to take responsibility that you are no longer competitive because you no longer possess the tools you need to stay in the game. In other words, you are the last guy still writing checks by hand, has a website with still pictures and a lot of words or refusing to post on Facebook because you don’t understand how it works. Lazy in the mind is just another way of saying broke and irrelevant.

• The failure to make a decision and react: Gone are the days where most decisions, especially concerning daily business operations, can be put off or ignored at some mythical point in the future. Time is not your friend in the world of small business and the book mentioned above highlights this theme. In the old days, the chains could destroy an independent operator, but today, a small quick moving chain of gyms can master a market by being able to make quick and decisive decisions in their operations.

Need to add more, large group training? The quick can train everyone up over a weekend, order the equipment, change the price structure, eliminate unneeded equipment and have a new program up in a few weeks. The chain players, on the other hand, need months if not years to make any significant change because the constant need exists to constantly fight the culture of, "We have always done it this way—why change now?”

Change is inevitable: it is how you deal with change that separates you from the players that fight against the flow and fail. Perhaps the greatest skill of any owner, and maybe consultants, is to understand the nature of change and to understand not where we are, or worse where we were, but where we are going to be in five years. Embrace what you fear the most, and for most of you it is change.