“Business” is a tricky word. Ask one hundred professionals what the word means and you’ll get one hundred answers. Some think business is just sales and marketing. Others think it’s budgets and accounting. Some think it’s leadership and organizational structure. Others think it’s systems and standardization.
This idea that people have different, sometimes conflicting, business notions makes complete sense. Fortune 100 CEOs should think differently than small-business owners, interns, startup entrepreneurs, or solopreneurs. Sadly though, many health and fitness professionals, including some leading their own companies, don’t think much about business at all.
Let’s fix that in this chapter.
In it, I’ll unpack the five most important business skills you’ll need to:
figure out what’s worth spending time on, and a process for making sure you do;
attract new clients and customers, faster than you can imagine;
support your fast-growing client list, while personalizing each individual’s experience;
recruit new team members, people excited to support your mission;
help your team do great work, better than you could have done alone.
Yet these five skills aren’t just for professionals who want to own a business, or those who already do. They’re for every employee, solopreneur, entrepreneur, and business owner.
They’re also the most important skills I’ve had to build over the last fifteen years as I transitioned from employee to solopreneur to entrepreneur to board member to investor. I didn’t even know I’d need many of them until I did (like the need to attract and hire talented people plus organize them in a way that allows everyone to do their best work).
As you read through these, some skills will feel more relevant than others, depending on where you’re at in your career. Yet I highly recommend reviewing them anyway—consider this chapter a crystal ball that will allow you to look into your own future and be prepared for what’s to come.
THE FIVE MOST IMPORTANT BUSINESS SKILLS
1 Ruthless Prioritization
2 Marketing and Sales
3 Building Systems
4 Hiring Team Members
5 Organizing Teams
When it comes to building a great career, your first priority is to learn how to prioritize.
Whether we’re talking about your professional projects or your social life, recreational activities or entertainment choices, there will always be more options than you have the resources to pursue. Let’s say you’ve started a new business and have identified “attracting new clients” as your big opportunity. That’s great. But how will you go about attracting them? With print or online ads? An expensive marketing campaign? Asking for referrals? Appearing on TV? Something else?
With limited time, attention, and money, it’ll be difficult to try everything that could work. (And impossible to do it all well.) This means you’ll have to decide which one or two things to try, choosing based on cost, time requirements, skills needed, and probability of success. From there you’ll have to prioritize those one or two things even over the long list of other things that feel important but can’t be invested in right now. You’ll know you’re doing this right if you occasionally experience regret and the fear of missing out: Shouldn’t I also be doing X, Y, and Z?
It’s this idea of doing X even over Y that makes prioritization so important yet difficult. Because it means constantly saying no to a host of good opportunities to make room for the few great opportunities truly worth doing now. I remember, early in my career, I dreamed of a day when I had access to more resources, when I didn’t have to prioritize so ruthlessly, when I could do everything that felt important. Then I started consulting with companies like Apple, Equinox, and Nike and learned an important lesson.
After a board meeting in which an Apple executive talked about his big frustrations with resource constraints, it hit me. If executives at the biggest companies in the world still complain about resource constraints, those limitations must never go away. So, instead of dreaming of a day without constraints, or complaining about not having enough resources, I’d be better served to get really good at prioritizing as a way to use my resources more effectively.
This applies whether you’re the co-founder of a company, an executive at that company, an employee of that executive, or an independent contractor. We all have never-ending lists of things we could do. Facing these long lists can feel frustrating and demoralizing if there’s no criteria for figuring out what’s important to do next.
Some folks try to handle this problem by thinking in terms of efficiency. They look for ways to get more done in less time. However, even if you’re busy knocking off to-dos at an alarming pace, you won’t be accomplishing anything important if those to-dos aren’t worth doing. All your time, energy, talent, and unique abilities will be wasted.
Of course, efficiency is important. It’s always great to use resources well and to get more done with the same amount of time, money, and team members. However, if I had to prioritize between efficiency and effectiveness, I’d pick effectiveness—doing the right things—every time. This means getting clear on what’s worth doing (and what’s not worth doing) and then focusing on that almost exclusively. Later in this chapter I’ll share how I do it.
For now, don’t ask what you can accomplish in a week, ask what you can accomplish in a year
I was recently asked, “In the early days of Precision Nutrition, what did you focus on? Was it content? Did you have help with that? How involved were you on the business side? Or did you hire help there? How about on the coaching side?” In essence, “While you were small and didn’t quite have the resources yet, how did you deal with everything?” Those are prioritization questions.
When we started the company, it was just Phil and me. We did everything, so we had to make hard choices every week. Each Monday we’d start by identifying the most important thing to accomplish that week, defined by its ability to help us grow the business. We’d be ruthless about keeping to that, even if something new, exciting, or distracting came up.
As a result, some weeks were all about working on content. Others marketing. Others finance. Others shipping and logistics. It was a constant balancing act using the theory of constraints as our guide, a process by which you identify the most important limiting factor standing in the way of your goals and then improve that thing until it’s no longer the bottleneck or weak link in the chain.
Using this methodology, the weekly priorities often changed. But what remained constant was this: We always had one task sitting on the throne of the Kingdom of To-Do. Even more, everything that didn’t make the To-Do list became our de facto To-Not-Do list. Often that list contained great ideas. But, sometimes frustratingly, they’d have to wait. This even over that.
This practice takes discipline because it’s easy to feel anxious and impatient within any given week. Indeed, many weeks I was riddled with anxiety, thinking, I’ll never make a dent in my big goals at this pace! However, experience taught me I can accomplish a helluva lot over the course of a year if my activity is well prioritized and I stay focused on the right work. And counseling taught me how to deal with the impatience, stress, and anxiety I’d often feel before I learned that lesson.*
With all that said, I don’t want to imply that we were excellent at prioritization from the start. Neither Phil nor I had any formal business training or any reps at figuring out how to prioritize. We weren’t perfect. Yet we continued to try our best. Considering that some weeks we got it wrong and others we did nothing worthwhile at all, we still accomplished a lot in a year. Over the first five years we achieved massive goals that we’d have never dared to set in the early days.
Sure, when you’re in the depths of time or resource scarcity, it can feel like no matter how much you want to power through responsibilities, there are always ten thousand other things to do. However, prioritization is a skill. Develop it, using the following strategies, and you’ll feel less anxiety and experience an improved ability to do the right work in the most efficient ways.
Strategy #1:
Reframe your definition of productivity
In many work cultures there are implicit social rewards for being busy and for doing more than the next person. But working ninety hours a week and feeling like your brain is in a high-speed blender isn’t actually rewarded unless those hours lead to the achievement of big, important goals.
What if we could achieve those big, important goals without the brain blender? What if we could do much less than everyone else but make sure everything is of critical importance and moves the needle in measurable, meaningful ways? By prioritizing effectiveness over efficiency, could we stand out from our peers and accomplish more?
It turns out the answer is yes. Most of the extremely high performers I know take this approach.
EFFECTIVE VS. EFFICIENT
Productivity IS NOT:
sleeping less, working more, and hustling harder
multitasking social media on your phone while doing invoices and responding to emails on your desktop
“productivity hacks” that are supposed to make you more efficient but scramble your thinking instead
trying to do everything that could make a difference because you’re afraid of missing out
Productivity IS:
organizing and prioritizing your time ruthlessly
ditching many low-leverage tasks and replacing them with a few high-leverage tasks
automating the things that can be automated
focusing the rest of your time on your unique abilities
None of this, of course, means that developing your skills and your business is going to be easier or less work. When you’re just starting out, there is no “four-hour work week.” This process simply helps you make sure all the hard work you’re inevitably going to do has a chance of paying off, instead of just keeping you busy.
Strategy #2:
Free up time for more high-leverage work
In health and fitness we often ask clients to fill out food diaries and training logs. The professional equivalent? A time and activity log. The idea is to keep a record of everything you do during your week, cataloging your tasks and the time it takes to do them.
We ask our students to do this every year, and they’re always surprised to see how they’re really spending time compared with how they think they’re spending it. For example, some find they’re on social media or browsing the internet or watching TV more than expected. Others realize they might even be—gasp—exercising more than needed.
You don’t need fancy apps or time trackers for this, although you can use them if you want. Your logs could be as simple as keeping the Time Diary on the next few pages.
Your Time Diary
Keep a record of everything you do during your week, cataloging your tasks and the time it takes to do them.
After a week or so of recording, divide your work into one of these categories:
1 Low-leverage activities I worked on
To do this exercise, and all upcoming ones, please download our printable + fillable worksheets at www.changemakeracademy.com/downloadable-forms.
2 High-leverage activities I worked on
3 High-leverage activities I didn’t work on*
Next, look at how much time you’re spending on low-leverage activities, the ones that feel urgent or important but don’t make a difference in getting clients, keeping them, growing a business, or achieving any goal you’ve set out to achieve.
Back when I was a full-time personal trainer and lifestyle coach, it was scheduling, invoicing, and answering basic questions about protein and peanut butter that felt annoying, low leverage, and in the way of my bigger goals. If I was busy doing these things, I wasn’t working on getting new clients, building systems, or learning more about my craft.
Next ask yourself if there’s a way to cut down on the time you’re spending on low-leverage things by creating templates for the same emails you send out every week, or using scheduling software, or using an automated billing system.
Are there some you can flat-out eliminate? Is there a way to structure your month so certain tasks can be done in a single chunk on a specific day, rather than having them hang over your head every day or every week?
The goal here isn’t necessarily to eliminate low-leverage activities. Some of them are necessary—for now anyway. Rather, the goal is to reduce time spent on them, freeing you up to do more high-leverage tasks, including some of the things you’ve been procrastinating for much too long now.
Strategy #3:
Schedule time to think
If you’ve followed steps #1 and #2 above, you’ll have bought back some time. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. So what should you do with that time?
If you’ve been overstressed and overworked for much too long, rest. Seriously. Take a nap, go to the spa, spend time in nature. Invest in recharging your physical and mental batteries because you’ll need to be at the top of your game for what comes next.
What does come next? Booking appointments with yourself for thinking about, researching, sanity checking, and getting others’ thoughts on the high-leverage work worth tackling right now. This is so important that I’d like you to schedule that time immediately.
Schedule Time for Thinking
On which day of the week can you budget a few hours for thinking?
How long can you budget for this?
Now pop open your calendar and make your first appointment with yourself to do it. Which day did you choose?
I get it. When there’s so much to do, it can seem like a waste of time to spend a few hours per week thinking. Yet, once you reorient your mind to effectiveness over efficiency, you’ll see this is your best opportunity to figure out how not to get into the same position again. You’ll start considering how to eliminate or automate lower-leverage activities. Plus, you’ll begin to discover the high-leverage activities that can remove your biggest limiting factors and get you to your goals.
I spend a half day on this every week. In my calendar, “Thinking” is blocked off from 9 am until 1 pm every Friday. Of course, during this time I don’t just sit in lotus pose and hope ideas start zip-lining from neuron to neuron. I use the time for brainstorming, journaling, mind mapping, interviewing experts, reading, and more. All to help solve current problems or to think up my next set of high-leverage opportunities.
Strategy #4:
Play the to-do tournament to decide what’s next
After a while, if you do all this right, you’ll likely end up with a too-long list of interesting and high-leverage to-dos. This is a great problem to have, yet it can still turn into an imposing wall of items and deadlines, a grocery list of responsibilities where it doesn’t matter which aisle you go down first. However, to-do lists shouldn’t operate like grocery lists with each item being treated equally. They should operate more like bracketed sports tournaments where items have to compete for the main prize: your precious time and energy.
For smaller tasks, daily or weekly tournaments can help you decide what to do for the next few hours, or for the next few days. For larger strategic goals, quarterly or annual tournaments can help make it clear what you should be working on for the entire year, plus they can help you make sure your daily and weekly tournaments are being decided based on your larger goals.
No matter the time scale, if you want to increase your probability of success without committing to working twice as many hours as everyone else—which isn’t a guarantee of success either—you need ruthless clarity and prioritization.
As time goes by, more and more opportunities will come flying at you. You’ll never have enough resources. Your only competitive advantage is a counterintuitive one: Put rigid constraints on your time, figure out the very few opportunities worth doing, focus on those few unwaveringly, and pass on everything else.
The To-Do Tournament
The tournament bracket method can help you figure out what’s worth doing and what to pass on.
To do so, put your ideas and opportunities up against each other using the bracket below or online.
Now, use the theory of constraints—identifying the bottleneck, weak link, or most important limiting factor standing in the way of your next goal—to help inform which activity should win.
One trick that helps me here is to visualize my commitments of time and energy on a zero (no commitments at all) to ten (time and energy are completely maxed out) scale.
Earlier in my career, I’d say yes to far too many things, living in the red zone, right around nine or ten. This meant I was always one unexpected problem or challenge away from overwhelm.
This created difficulties for me personally and professionally. On the personal side, I never had enough mojo for nonwork things like going on fun adventures with friends and family. Heck, even one night out felt like too much to take on. And, on the professional side, should a really meaningful opportunity come up, I would either miss it (because I was too stressed to see its merit) or do it badly (because I didn’t have enough time or energy to do it well).
At one point I remember my to-do list included: writing a book, coordinating a multi-center research project, and traveling throughout the US and Canada to give a series of seminars. This on top of my daily Precision Nutrition responsibilities, my self-care, my commitments to friends and family, and helping care for our newborn daughter. I was a hair’s width from burnout. Then, in a single week, my wife got the flu and our car broke down. While these should have felt like small, routine disruptions, I felt like they signaled the end of the world.
Of course, everything worked out okay. However, I learned an important lesson that’s stuck with me to this very day. I now only commit to the amount of work that puts me in the five or six range.
This offers three important advantages, making it good for business and good for me.
First, it makes me much more selective, forcing me to take on only the highest-impact, most meaningful work and life projects. Second, it leaves me with energy in reserve for personal interests, family time, and more. Finally, it puts me in a position where I can occasionally take on additional high-impact, short-term projects because I have energy units in reserve.
To this last point, I’m careful not to do this too often lest I end up back where I started, constantly in the red zone. I accomplish this by doing weekly check-ins with myself (to reevaluate where I am on the time and energy scale) and with my family (to make sure I get an outside view).
Many budding entrepreneurs spend a lot of time and money on:
finding the perfect name for their business,
creating the perfect logo, business cards, and letterhead,
protecting their intellectual property via trademarks and copyrights,
finding the very best billing, list management, or scheduling systems,
setting up an optimal tax structure.
Now, I’m not saying these things are unimportant or that you shouldn’t think about them. But they shouldn’t be your first concern. Precision Nutrition didn’t worry about any of them for our first five to seven years. Likewise, we were five years behind on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And we’re still using an antiquated email management tool that most people replaced back in 2006.
How, then, did we manage to grow a $200+ million business? By focusing our limited resources on the only thing that matters to a new business: Getting customers!
As the saying goes:
Sales solve everything.
I’ll always remember a meeting we had about five years after we started our first company. We were at an expensive restaurant in Toronto, conferring with a high-paid accountant. “Your books are a mess!” he told us. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” he asked his assistant, laughing.
During the early years of Precision Nutrition, I heard similar sentiments from well-respected accountants, lawyers, bankers, insurance brokers, and more. Yet I didn’t quite feel the shame or embarrassment I think they wanted me to feel. Instead of focusing on intellectual property law or getting the most robust insurance coverage, we focused on selling things to our ideal clients and customers. Earning enough to keep going. Profiting enough to grow.
So, when faced with these kinds of comments from other professionals, I’ve been known to joke: “Yep, we could’ve taken care of some of these sooner. But we were busy making great products and selling them. Without that we wouldn’t be here today, ready to pay your zillion-dollar-an-hour rates. So, by all accounts, I think we made the right choice.” They tend to concede the point.
Nowadays we’ve buttoned down all those other aspects of our business, of course. But only after we’d built a solid foundation and made enough profit to reinvest in these “nice to have” options. While other startups were messing around with lower-value activities, we made it our main goal to keep the main goal—creating great products and making money selling them—the main goal.
There are lots of things that different people will want you to prioritize in your business—and in your life. Some of them, like protecting intellectual property, or using top-notch systems, are good ideas. But remember that prioritization is about this even over that. When it comes to business, it’s marketing and sales pretty much over everything else. Because, without income, you can’t afford to do anything else.
So, how do you get good at marketing and sales? You start by knowing the difference between them.
Sales is someone walking into your physical location (or emailing you) to ask about your products and services. Regardless of where they fall on a scale of 0 to 10 in terms of readiness to buy, it’s your job to convince them that a) they need what you’re selling and b) they should pay for it today. Your mission is to move them from whatever number they’re at on the 0 to 10 scale all the way up to a 10. This requires quick relationship building and a lot of persuasion.
Marketing, on the other hand, is identifying your ideal customer early, crafting a compelling offer just for them, and attracting those people to your physical location (or inbox) already at an 8 or 9 out of 10 on the readiness-to-buy scale. In essence, great marketing makes selling significantly easier. Which is why we’ve always put so much emphasis on it at Precision Nutrition. We’ve even come up with a fancy name for how we do it. We call it our Tripod Marketing Formula.
THE TRIPOD MARKETING FORMULA
1 Know what people want.
2 Do something awesome to deliver it.
3 Tell everyone about it.
Tripod Leg #1: Know what people want
People passionate about health and fitness—experienced hobbyists and professionals alike—often assume they know what people really want when it comes to coaching: to “look good naked,” to improve their blood panels, to get better at their sport. And while that’s likely part of why they hire us, it’s probably not the full story.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, the best way to find out what’s really important to people is to study them. In Precision Nutrition’s case, one negative review of our coaching program made me realize that we needed to learn more about what our clients really wanted. So we spent months doing client interviews and exit surveys with people who left our programs.
This was a turning point for us. When we learned for sure what our clients were seeking, business took off. Our clients felt better served, and we felt more satisfied in our work. To this end, I encourage you to become an “anthropologist” of your clients (or potential clients) using the methods I outlined in Chapter 3.
Tripod Leg #2: Do something awesome to deliver it
Through our research, we learned that, no matter what their physical goals were, everyone who hired us for coaching wanted the same thing: They wanted personal attention. They didn’t need a lot of it. Rather, they wanted to be pleasantly surprised by personal attention. They wanted to feel cared for and acknowledged outside the context of a normal coaching interaction.
It wasn’t enough for us to do lifestyle coaching. It wasn’t enough to respond quickly and offer guidance when asked for. To give our clients what they truly wanted, we had to find strategic ways to show them we were paying attention—especially at times when they were least expecting it.
This didn’t have to be complicated. For instance, we changed our intake questionnaire to make it easier to deliver a personal touch. Previously, when a client joined, they’d fill out a form that asked about everything from their previous exercise and nutrition experience to their personal goals and any injuries or illnesses they had. But armed with this new insight, we added a few questions like:
Do you have any pets? If so, what kind of animal and what’s their name?
How will you reward yourself if you achieve your goals? (Will you take a big trip somewhere? Try a new sport or hobby?)
We also ensured that coaches had this important information about their clients close at hand. Every client soon had a “profile” that their coach could see, at a glance, with things like:
their clients’ exercise and nutrition history
where they lived
the names of their family members and pets
their hobbies and what they did for fun
their goals and aspirations
how they planned on rewarding themselves once they accomplished their goals
Our coaches could now offer exercise and nutrition help and personalize their interactions with clients in small ways that had a big impact. They started adding simple comments like:
Make sure to stay warm out there; looks like you have a hell of a snowstorm on the way.
Hey, I see it’s your birthday coming up. Do you have any plans?
My dog loves these sweet potato doggie treats; I hope you don’t mind, but I just sent you and Sparky a box. Let me know what he thinks!
It may not seem like much. But when you’re working with an online client, any kind of personal connection—especially an unexpected sentence or two—is amplified and appreciated.*
How could you offer unexpected personal attention like this for the people you serve? My favorite way is something popularized by Jonathan Goodman, who wrote the foreword to this book. Here’s his strategy, in a nutshell:
Whenever there’s an opportunity to do something cool (and quick) for your client, take it. For instance, let’s say during one of your sessions, a client mentions he’s sick of eating the same thing for breakfast every morning. You can try to give him some suggestions right then. But there’s a more thoughtful and personal way to show you care.
After your session is over, make a note for yourself:
Bill hates eating oatmeal every day for breakfast.
Find a couple of recipes and send them his way.
Then, before your next session with Bill, prepare your “gift.” It could be a simple link to an article with breakfast ideas. It could be a list of your favorite breakfasts and how to make them. If it’s within your means, it could be a cookbook or even a Magic Bullet blender. If you like playing chef, maybe you even make him some simple homemade granola, pop it into a Mason jar, and include the recipe. (Very hipster.)
Whatever it is, the next time you have a session with Bill, hand him the gift and say:
Hey, I was thinking about you after our last session, and I thought you’d really like this.
Why is this simple act so powerful?
1 Bill doesn’t expect it.
Telling Bill you’re going to get him a cookbook or write down your favorite breakfast meal is nice, but it’s also an explicit promise. If you fulfill that promise, Bill feels good. But if you don’t fulfill that promise—if you forget to grab the cookbook or didn’t have time to write down your ideas—Bill loses a little bit of trust in you. By writing a note to yourself and surprising Bill the next time you see him, you’re delivering something unexpectedly kind, which earns you more points than merely delivering on an expectation.
2 It shows you’re paying attention.
Many simply don’t have enough people in their lives showing them respect, listening closely to them, and remembering what they shared. By not only listening, but demonstrating that you’re listening, you show that you care. This is the unexpected personal attention I mentioned earlier.
3 It shows you don’t stop thinking about clients when they’re not with you.
And that comes down to how you frame your gift giving: Hey, I was thinking about you after our last session, and I thought you’d really like this. Who wants to be thought about and cared for, even if they’re not around? Everyone.
Tripod Leg #3: Tell everyone about it
Once we figured out what our clients wanted (unexpected personal attention) and simple ways to deliver it awesomely (small, strategic comments and gifts based on new coaching intel), we wanted to tell everyone about our highly effective and surprisingly personal coaching system. The goal quickly became clear: tell our story to more people.
For an online business, that meant getting more people to visit our website. More website traffic (especially if they’re legitimate prospects interested in what we offer) means more people signing up for our coaching programs. When more people join our programs, we make more money. When we make more money, we can invest in improving the quality of our service, hiring more team members, and building additional products and services.
But how did we get the ball rolling?
For instance, among our many options, we could have:
written more blog posts and articles targeted specifically to the kinds of people who would be most likely to join our programs;
written guest articles for other blogs and get links back to our website;
improved our referral network and get more affiliates who can send more website traffic;
improved our website’s SEO (search engine optimization) and do more targeted ads; put strategic promoted posts on Facebook targeted to friends of our clients and customers, linking them to helpful articles and free courses.
While your business may not be the same as ours, all business realities are similar: There’s only so much time, money, energy, and resources to go around. Like us, you have to exercise skill number one, ruthless prioritization. You have to pick a path. And have a solid, data-driven rationale for it.
From all the available options, we guessed the following approach would have the highest probability of paying off—promoted posts on Facebook to friends of our readers, clients, and customers. We chose this for a few reasons:
1 We already had many Facebook fans: just over one hundred thousand at the time. That meant we had the potential to reach millions of friends of friends.
2 Through our interviews and research with clients, we realized people were more likely to join our coaching programs if a person they knew had tried it and been successful.
3 We were already getting roughly ten thousand website visits per week from Facebook; in other words, there was already an established connection with room to grow.
We spent the next few weeks coming up with a strategy and budget for running promoted posts on Facebook and then rolled it out. Ka-blam. In just a few weeks, our Facebook traffic went from around ten thousand visitors per week to just under one hundred thousand per week. More people visited our website, more people heard about the awesome things we’re doing, and more signed up for our programs.
But let’s be clear: Just like there’s no best diet, there’s no magic marketing method. The tactic that worked for us may not work for you.
Plus, unless you’ve spent the time to deeply understand your prospects and devoted resources to delivering something awesome, no amount of marketing will matter. Worry about making something valuable that people really want first, then figure out which channel to use to sell it.*
When it’s time to tell everyone about your awesome product, focus on the one or two methods that best connect you to your audience. Look at data on your clients and the people you want to work with. What does it tell you about where and how to get more people to find you?
Then consider the option that may bring you the most qualified leads—in other words, the people most likely to buy your product or service and get benefit from it.
Sheer numbers don’t count. Anyone can print a thousand flyers and plaster them all over the neighborhood. And a hundred “Likes” on social media may translate into zero dollars. Instead, ask yourself: Where is my ideal audience? How can I reach them? (If you aren’t sure who your specific audience is, go back to Tripod Leg #1.)
Gather the data. Look at your current roster (if you have a good group and they represent your ideal client) and ask yourself: How did these people find out about me? You may quickly find a pattern (for example, most of your ideal clients might have heard about you from a friend or family member). Once you find a pattern, you can find ways to do more of that. Improve and amplify what’s already working.
Important: The Giving vs. Asking ratio
The guiding principle of our marketing strategy has always been what we call the Giving vs. Asking ratio. We want to give awesome, free, educational content to our audience at a higher ratio than we ask them to buy something. So, rather than promoting our coaching programs directly, we promoted very high quality, free five-day courses for men and women, teaching them how to eat, move, and live better to improve their health and fitness. This sales funnel looked like this:
Notice how much free general and product-specific education we’ve given before ever asking for something (i.e., to join our program). When calculated out, our Giving vs. Asking ratio across our entire website, and all our programs, is about ten to one.
What Can You Give?
At Precision Nutrition, most of our “gifts” are free articles, courses, and videos. Yours could be different. Capitalize on your own unique abilities. For example:
If you’re a good writer, write a free article, booklet, or useful handout.
If you have a knack for design, create infographics or workout journals.
If you love to cook or bake, whip up some free protein bars or green drinks.
If you’re a performer, make free educational or instructional videos.
What kinds of things could you give to readers, clients, and prospects to increase your exposure, build trust with them, and increase the chance they’ll buy from you in the future?
Forget features and benefits; focus on a hopeful future
Many health and fitness pros bristle at the idea of marketing and selling because, when approached by prospects, they get embarrassed and “just don’t know what to say.” They feel like they need a great pitch that covers all the features and benefits of what they’re selling. At the same time, they feel like long, boastful monologues about themselves and their product are unpalatable.
Well, they’re right about that last part. Boastful (and boring) monologues are unpalatable. That’s why I recommend a totally different approach. Because marketing and sales aren’t about you, your product, or your service. They’re not even about the features or benefits of your product or service. Rather, marketing and sales are about painting a compelling and hopeful future for your prospects.
This cartoon sums it up perfectly:
Get it? When telling people about your product or service, you shouldn’t be talking about what it is and what it does. Rather, you should be talking about what they can do with your product. The first is about you while the second is about them. And that’s why people buy things: to help them solve some sort of problem in their lives. So make sure all your marketing and selling is about the hopeful future they can expect when working with you.
The Hopeful Future
Marketing and sales are about painting a compelling and hopeful future for your prospects. To do that, fill out the following.
Write down who you are and what you do.
Example: My name is John and I run a company called Precision Nutrition that offers coaching for clients, certification for professionals, and coaching software for certified professionals.
Now write down the features of your product or service.
Example: The Precision Nutrition certification includes a) a 600-page definitive textbook covering the art and science of nutrition coaching, b) an online learning portal with videos, lessons, and quizzes, and c) a group forum for interacting with instructors, coaches, and other students.
Now write down the benefits of your product or service.
Example: The Precision Nutrition Certification helps you master the science of nutrition and the art of coaching using a university-level curriculum without having to quit your job and go back to school. Study at your own pace, anywhere, take the quizzes online, and earn a certificate in exercise nutrition.
Now write down the hopeful future people can expect when working with you.
Example: With the Precision Nutrition Certification, you’ll master the industry’s most effective nutrition coaching system, helping you get life-changing results for yourself and the people who come to you for advice. You’ll feel competent and credible in any coaching scenario, with any client. And you’ll be able to deliver advice that you know is right, in a way that helps your clients put it into action immediately, without resistance, and without eventually falling off the wagon.
When writing about our coaching programs, we don’t talk about habits, sustainable change, or lessons and thought exercises even though these are the cornerstones of our programs. Nor do we talk about workout details, diets, meal plans, or menus.
Instead, we talk about how we help them:
eat better, without dieting or feeling deprived;
get active, no matter what shape they’re in now;
ditch the food rules, dropping the fad diets and conflicting advice;
build fitness into their life, without it taking over;
achieve, and maintain, their goals, even when life gets busy.
We tell them how they’ll end up:
losing the weight/fat they haven’t been able to shed for years;
building physical strength and confidence in their body;
gaining mental confidence, no longer hiding their gifts and talents;
letting go of food confusion, learning what to do, how to do it;
getting off the diet roller coaster once and for all, and never looking back.
To really paint a hopeful future, we help them imagine a life where they can . . .
. . . feel physically and mentally strong, capable of taking on any challenge without worrying that their energy levels or body weight will get in the way;
. . . run around with their kids, or grandkids, without feeling pain, winded, or tired—and they can do it again the next day;
. . . excitedly book a beach vacation without wondering how they’ll look (or feel) in a swimsuit, walking along the shore;
. . . have their picture taken without being shocked at how different they actually appear from how they imagine themselves to look;
. . . feel like food is their friend, not their enemy, and never diet again.
Even better, we show them real examples of other people we’ve helped live this more hopeful future with more than one thousand before-and-after pictures, hundreds of testimonials and quotes, and dozens of feature-length interviews with and stories about our successful clients.
It’s okay if you don’t have this volume of evidence. Even a handful of compelling success stories is a good start and enough to convince your next handful of clients to give your products and services a try.
Your Elevator Pitch
To help paint a crystal-clear picture of what you do, who you serve, and the hopeful future you can provide people with, it’s important to create a brief “elevator pitch” like this.
I help {kind of person}
to {action/benefit}
so that they can {brighter future/more inspiring benefit}.
Here are some examples of what you might come up with:
I help {new moms},
to {get active and eat better},
so that they can {drop their baby weight and feel more energy}.
I help {busy executives},
to {find time in their schedule for healthy habits},
so they can {finally get their health under control}.
I help {people with back pain},
to {move freely again},
so that they can {live their lives without pain and disability}.
I help {young athletes},
to {improve their movement quality},
so that they can {dominate on the playing field and injury-proof themselves}.
I help {women with health challenges},
to {figure out what’s going on with their bodies},
so that they can {manage their symptoms and feel in control of their bodies again}.
I help {people in their sixties and seventies},
to {begin a new movement practice},
so they can {walk, jump, run, and play with their grandkids}.
Give it a try:
I help
to
so that they can
Get your first few clients with survey selling
Once you’ve identified your ideal client, the benefit you can deliver for them, and the hopeful future they can expect in working with you, it’s time to go out and look for them. One strategy I’ve found particularly effective for getting your first few clients is “survey selling.”
Begin by creating your survey. (I recommend Google Forms for this as it’s free and easy to use, with quick how-to tutorials for beginners.) When creating your survey, start with a title, a compelling description, a few demographic questions. Here’s an example of what you might come up with if you were a fitness and nutrition coach:
Here’s the formula:
I’m looking for {number of people} {gender} ages {age range} who live in {your location} and are looking to {goal}.
If this is you, please fill out the form below. All eligible applications will be contacted by phone.
Once your form is complete, be sure to enable notifications so that you’ll be emailed every time a prospective client submits a completed form.
Next, share a link to your survey (on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or wherever you prefer) by posting your survey description as follows:
***I’m looking for {number of people} {gender} ages {age range} looking to {goal} that live in {location}.***
I am looking for {gender} who want to:
-{benefit 1}
-{benefit 2}
-{benefit 3}
Spots are extremely limited and I’m only looking for {number of people} who are ready to make a change today. To apply, fill out the quick survey below and I’ll be in touch if you meet the requirements:
===> {link to your Google form}
The benefits you include will vary but they should speak to the hopeful future I described earlier.
Once you get the message out and people start responding, make sure someone calls them right away to learn more about their goals and expectations and to tell them more about how you work. As discussed in Chapter 4, take a client-centered approach here, asking questions and focusing on who they are and what they need before talking about what you can do, your fees, etc. Ideally you’ll get in touch within twenty minutes of them filling out your survey, at the peak of their interest.
If you’re able to get in touch with them and you schedule an initial appointment together, fantastic. If not, keep following up, with a friendly check-in, once a week for the first month. If you’re still unsuccessful, follow up once a month after that until they become a client or tell you they’re not interested in working with you.
This is where most people drop the ball, assuming that if someone hasn’t gotten back to them or made an appointment, they’re not interested. This is a bad assumption. Sometimes people are busy, need to think more, or have to talk it over with a significant other. By continuing to reach out in a friendly way, you make sure that when they are ready to get started, it’s with you.
If you decide to try this method, you’ll be up and running with your first post inside of thirty minutes. Most people who try it report getting one to three clients within a day or two. Even if you think it’s too simple or couldn’t possibly work, try it anyway. People constantly tell me that they would have never expected something like this to work. But it did, exactly how I said it would.
Tell People What You Do
Every year, through our Precision Nutrition Facebook groups, we do a two-week challenge. Our certification students and graduates are encouraged to do something simple (yet, apparently, radical these days). They are asked to talk to people. You know, like, real people. In real life.
Specifically, we ask them to tell one person a day what they do.
That person could be anyone: the barista that frothed the milk on their latte, the cashier at the grocery store, or the lady sitting next to them on their commuter train. The goal is to develop a “script” about what they do, get comfortable talking about it, and maybe even get a new client or a referral. If you’re interested in trying it, here’s how it works.
The “Tell People What You Do” Challenge
Begin by making sure you can describe what you do without rambling and without boring listeners with irrelevant details. A simple way to do this is to use the statement you created in Your Elevator Pitch on page 186:
I help {kind of person}
to {action/benefit}
so that they can {brighter future/more inspiring benefit}.
Next, pick a person (any person) every day to talk to. You can approach folks however you like to get the conversation started. If you’re not sure how to do that without coming off creepy, break the ice with something like this:
Hey!
I’m doing this two-week challenge where I have to tell someone about what I do, and you’re who I chose today!
Is that cool?
If they’re game, lay the elevator pitch—or something like it—on them. If they seem interested, expand on it. The conversation could end pleasantly but without any real interest on their part and that’s okay. You’ll still benefit from the practice. However, should they express real interest, keep the conversation going with something like:
Hey, thanks for listening. Mission accomplished on the contest!
Before I roll, you seemed kinda interested in {some aspect of what you talked about} and a really cool resource just popped into my head that I’d love to share.
Could you write down your {email address/phone number/FB page} so I can send it over?
Just so you know, “no” is a fine answer here. After all, we just met.
However, I do think you’ll dig it. And I promise not to bug you beyond that.
If they share their contact info, wait a day and follow up with something awesome—a cool article, some recipes, an info-graphic, an inspiring YouTube video—whatever you think will be helpful and is in line with what you talked about. It doesn’t have to be your own content. Just something that’s high quality and will be genuinely helpful. Here’s how you might follow up.
Hi!
It’s {your name}, we met yesterday at {place} and we talked about {topic}.
Wanted to follow up with {the thing I promised}, which I think you’ll like.
Here’s the link:
{link to the thing here}
No obligation to {watch it, read it, etc.}. I just thought it might help.
If they follow up and thank you for the link, reply with a casual reference to your services.
Thanks for the note!
I’m so glad you liked {the thing you sent}!
I don’t know if you, or anyone you know, would be interested in this . . . but I’m running a program that starts in two weeks.
I’ll be working with {number of people} {gender} ages {age range} looking to {goal}.
Spots are extremely limited and I’m only looking for {number of people}.
Again, if you or someone you know is interested, let me know by filling out this super-quick survey below.
===> {link to your Google form}
Again, no pressure. Just sharing this in case you, or a friend, might be interested.
So there you have it. A step-by-step guide on how to talk to people and follow up in a non-creepy, not overly pushy kind of way. The point of this exercise is to show you that there are potential clients everywhere. You just need to speak up so they know you’re there.
Leverage your existing communities
Many of us belong to one group, or a host of them, either online or in person. These are often unrelated to health and fitness, which—in this case—is a good thing. It gives you the opportunity to share what you do with a new audience.
For example, you might be part of:
a Facebook group for new moms
a Saturday-morning bring-your-dog-and-hike group
an online forum for people who dig classic cars
a faith community where you worship plus participate in community activities together
a weekly online mastermind group of career-change entrepreneurs
If you do it right, as my friend Carolina did, these groups can be an amazing source of new clients. Here’s how she did it.
Carolina is from Mexico, but she currently lives just outside of Toronto. When she came to Canada, she joined a Facebook group for Mexican women living abroad. She was genuinely excited to connect to this group and took her time getting to know the members. She responded to people’s posts, and posted her own successes and woes living abroad as a Mexican woman. She took note of the tone and “vibe” of this group, and generally just tried to be kind, helpful, and supportive to the other members without talking much about what she does for a living.
After a while, she posted about her coaching work. It was more of a “this is my life story” kind of post, but she also happened to mention that she was an online lifestyle coach and dropped some information about a program she was running that was starting soon. Not long after she posted, Carolina had:
700+ reactions to the original post
180+ comments asking for more information
250+ new “Likes” on her personal coaching Facebook page
80+ brand-new subscriptions to her mailing list
too many private messages to count
Not bad for a free group that she was interested in hanging out with anyway.
How to Leverage
Your Existing Communities
To try this method yourself:
JOIN A GROUP. Consider the groups you’re currently a member of (online or in person). If you’re not a member of any, consider whether there are any groups you’d like to be a part of that would be good candidates for your coaching. (Remember, it’s better if they’re not health and fitness groups.)
ENGAGE WITH THE GROUP in an authentic, helpful, supportive way. Don’t just join groups to make your elevator pitch as this is universally frowned upon. Instead, become a real part of the community and only talk about what you do if it’s relevant to the conversations already going on.
OFFER GENUINE HELP. If a health and fitness topic comes up, bingo! Help answer questions. Offer support. Send people helpful links, articles, videos, and other resources. You can be subtle about self-promotion by simply linking back to your website or social media profile. Still, hold back on mentioning your services.
OCCASIONALLY MENTION YOUR SERVICES. After you’ve built trust and made genuine connections, mention your services. Have your information easily available if people want it, but don’t be pushy about it. If you need a ratio to work with, for every ten helpful comments you make, you can slide in one about your coaching.
In the end, as mentioned earlier, when it comes to business, it’s marketing and sales pretty much over everything else. Because, without income, you can’t afford to do anything else. But don’t let the blizzard of information on these topics overwhelm you.
Marketing is simply:
1 Knowing what people want,
2 Doing something awesome to deliver that thing, and
3 Telling everyone about it.
And sales is simply showing people the compelling and hopeful future they can expect when working with you and creating some urgency around getting started now.
If you’re interested in going deeper into marketing, I highly recommend Robert Cialdini’s classic book Influence. In this book he outlines the six universal principles of persuasion used across industries to get people to say “yes” and shares examples of how you can apply them.
If you’d like to learn more about sales, check out Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling. In this book he teaches the art of consultative selling, a highly effective sales process in which the buyers do most of the talking and the sellers do most of the listening.
Prioritizing high-leverage tasks is one of the keys to using your resources effectively. However, you still have to do some low-leverage tasks. That’s where systems come into play. Systems allow you to find redundancies and time wasters in your work and streamline them to free up time for other activities.
For example, let’s say you’re an exercise and fitness coach, and you know you’ll have to answer the same few questions a bazillion times this year:
How many calories should I eat?
How many reps this time?
Is it okay to drink while I’m on vacation?
What workout can I do on my own this week?
Even if you’re fast and can put together answers in a few minutes, you’ll still spend hundreds of hours every year addressing the same things. That’s wasteful because you’re usually just providing the same basic info about macronutrients and muscle fibers, multivitamins and metabolism, again and again, only slightly adjusted for each person.
Imagine getting all that time back by having an “answer template” you can copy and paste from, adding small personal touches to ensure your messages don’t feel copied and pasted. That’s a lot of time freed up for higher-leverage, more enjoyable work. That’s time you can use on new initiatives to help grow your business instead of spending time in a never-ending loop of repetitive low-leverage tasks.
But how can you create these kinds of systems in simple ways without being a systems engineer or requiring expensive software? Here’s an example for those who do a lot of written communications.
Building Your Systems
STEP 1
Create a “General” file
You’ll need a list of the communications you use repeatedly. For a standard coaching business, this may include:
information about services and pricing
welcome messages
reminders about upcoming sessions
post-session check-ins
monthly “How’s it going?” messages
regular “You’re doing great” messages
requests for data like weight, measurements, blood work, etc.
ads and marketing materials
What categories of communications (info about services and pricing, welcome messages, reminders about upcoming sessions, post-session check-ins, etc.) do you use regularly?
Once you have your categories in mind, write the content itself. You’ll probably want to do this on your computer so you can save your own templates and paste in content from emails, brochures, or other material you’ve already written. Depending on the nature of your offerings, and how often you like to check in with clients, there might be a lot of things to document. That’s okay; take a few weeks to get this done. Don’t rush; do it right.
STEP 2
Create a “Programs” file
Whatever services you offer, you undoubtedly have to deliver them (and communicate about them) over and over. These communications might include:
intake questionnaires
workout plans (weight loss)
workout plans (weight gain)
workout plan FAQs
meal plans (weight loss)
meal plans (weight gain)
meal plan FAQs
meal-planning strategies
supplement guidelines (weight loss)
supplement guidelines (weight gain)
supplement FAQs
body-measurement guidelines
What categories of programs/deliverables (intake questionnaires, workout plans, eating plans, supplement guidelines, etc.) will you be using?
Again, capture these on your computer for easier copy/paste later.
STEP 3
Create an “Emails” file
Go through a couple months’ worth of “sent mail” messages and look for patterns. In the seeming hodgepodge of your communications with clients, there are probably repetitions. Typically, coaches send lots of messages about:
nutrition, workouts, and supplements
sleep, and stress management
travel and schedule-change challenges
meal-planning challenges
questions about nutrition basics
general anxieties about life/goals/programs/progress
Which emails are virtually the same? What categories of emails (nutrition/exercise/supplement discussions, sleep/stress-management discussions, travel/schedule discussions, general anxieties about life/goals/progress discussions) could you capture for easy copy/paste later?
In a new document, make a list of your email categories. Under each category heading, paste in your best email on the topic, and tweak/perfect it as necessary.
STEP 4
Create a Master Folder
Save your “General,” “Programs,” and “Emails” files in one easily accessible folder. Now you have a master database of the most common things you’ll need to type out. You can pull from it when it’s time to reply to questions, to send programs, or proactively reach out.
STEP 5
Remember to personalize
By the time you pull information from your Master Folder and paste it into a new document, email, or text message, you’re 90 percent done. The other 10 percent? Customizing for the specific person.
To do this, start with a friendly greeting and a sentence or two about how they’re doing, what they’ve been up to, etc. Then personalize your standard reply based on their situation. After that, sign and send.
This is just one example of how you can systematize your work, saving hundreds of hours every year. The same can be done for every repetitive thing you do—billing software for invoicing and collecting payments, accounting software for financial record keeping, scheduling software for booking and rearranging appointments, and so on. While some come with a price tag, you can think of this as buying hours back.
Using systems can feel less personal at first. And they’ll definitely become less personal if you turn into a copy-and-paste machine that devalues connection. At the same time, these very same systems can also help you deliver a more personal touch. If you spend some of your new-found time on engagement (listening, understanding, customizing, and doing the thoughtful things others won’t have time to think of doing), automation will help you deliver more, in better ways, than anyone else.
Solopreneurs and business owners eventually get to the point where the influx of new clients and customers outpaces their ability to keep up, no matter how they prioritize. On the one hand, they feel on their way to achieving big professional goals. On the other, they feel more stressed and anxious than ever. They wonder why, if growth is supposed to be fun, they’re not having any.
If you’re experiencing this, take heart. This is a great problem to have. (Too much business? Come on now!) Even better, these feelings indicate that you’ve solved the previous limiting factor in your business and are now butting up against a new one: not enough humanpower. This means it’s time to make hiring a top priority, at least for a little while, until you address this new constraint.
I know this cycle all too well. When Phil and I started, it was just the two of us. It was a few years before we hired our first full-time coach. It was a few more before we next hired help with product logistics and customer service. Then came someone to help with content. Then web development and design. Precision Nutrition now has close to 150 people working as full-time team members or contractors.
I’ll be honest: Over the years I’ve had a mixed relationship with hiring. So many questions swirled in my head in the early days. Can we really afford to pay someone to do what I’ve been doing? What if they can’t do it as well? What if they don’t care as much? Will they protect our brand reputation or ruin it?
At the same time, I knew we couldn’t go on working the way we were. Our options were to scale back (moving in the opposite direction of our goals), try to work at a burnout pace (which never goes well), or take the risk and bring someone new onto the team. We obviously chose the latter, learning some valuable lessons along the way.
Lesson 1: Don’t hire until it hurts
Most people don’t consider hiring until they’re struggling. The need for help slowly creeps up until they’re feeling overwhelmed and disheartened, even though their business is growing. They’re making more money but working more hours, too, and things in the business feel like they’re held together with duct tape. Left with no other choice, they finally bring on another team member.
This is a common experience. Many solopreneurs take a little too long to make their first hire. Interestingly, many hire too freely after that, especially if the first went well. That’s why I encourage folks to “wait until it hurts” not only with their first hire, but with subsequent ones. In other words, don’t hire when you or someone on your team feels: “I could use a little help over here.” Instead, hire when they feel: “This is growing so fast that, if I don’t get help, I’m going to split apart!”
This, of course, assumes you and your team have developed Skills #1 and #3: Ruthless Prioritization and Building Systems. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with long to-do lists of meaningless or repetitive tasks and then put in a request for hiring. So I’d add a caveat here. Yes, wait until it hurts to hire. But make sure the hurt is happening because of new clients, customers, and opportunities, not poor prioritization or lack of systems.
Lesson 2: Get clear on exactly what you need and hire for that
A few years back, a group of seven women I know and respect got together to start a women’s fitness company. While it seemed like a cool idea to everyone else, I cringed. They shared similar backgrounds, skills, and interests, so six were redundant. They’d be splitting startup revenues among seven people when only one was necessary. This would make it impossible to hire the additional skills required to grow the business. Because of this, I felt the partnership couldn’t last. It didn’t.
This is one of the reasons my partnership with Phil has been so valuable. When we partnered, we brought totally different—but complementary—backgrounds, experiences, and skills to the table. I came with an extensive background in exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle, plus writing and speaking experience. Phil was a health and fitness enthusiast with a systems design engineering degree and a special interest in business. Between us, we had enough raw materials for deep subject-level expertise, content creation, a digital presence, and business fundamentals. Neither of us was redundant; we were synergistic.
What’s good for partnerships is also good for hiring in many cases, but not all. So it’s important to get really clear on whether you need:
someone like you but more junior, to help with work overflow
someone like you but more senior, to help level up your business
someone totally different, to bring new skills into your business
Think carefully about exactly what you need. Articulate it clearly. Then go out and try to find that thing in a person. The clearer you are, the better your chances of making the right hire.
Lesson 3: Get some help with recruiting
When hiring for a role at Precision Nutrition, we look for individuals who we think could have a high probability of succeeding in our culture and in the role. But not just one or two. In most cases we start with hundreds of applicants, narrow that group down to dozens of prospects, and further narrow that group down to three “can’t lose” candidates.
Contrast this with what most small-business owners do: search their own contact list. This can sometimes work. But it’s often a recipe for failure, as individual networks are rarely large enough to produce even one “can’t lose” candidate, let alone three. (This is especially true if they’re looking for someone totally different, who can bring new skills into the business.)
Working with recruiters, whose job it is to build huge networks of well-qualified and well-vetted candidates, helps to strategically expand your network. It magically puts you one degree of separation from any talent or skill in the world.
But how do you find a recruiter in the first place? If you know someone who works in human resources or recruiting, ask them for guidance. They may know the top recruiters in your area. If you don’t know anyone in the industry, begin with an internet search. For example, if I were hiring for a marketing position at Precision Nutrition I’d type in “marketing recruiter Toronto.” Or, for an executive position, I’d type in “executive recruiter Toronto.”*
From there, narrow your search to firms with a strong track record of placing people in the kinds of positions you’re looking to fill. For example, if you’re looking to hire help with marketing or programming, choose a recruiter who specializes in placing the kinds of marketers or programmers you’re looking for. This gives you access to the biggest networks and increases your chances of finding the right person. But don’t just take their word for it; ask for references. Talk to people who’ve been hired through them as well as people who didn’t choose them and ask why.
Is this process more time-intensive and expensive than the alternative? Absolutely. However, the cost of hiring the wrong candidate is far higher. In my experience, it’s much better to wait a little longer to begin a hiring search, so you can do it right, than to hire haphazardly and get the wrong person.
Lesson 4: Put less stock in interviews, more in assessments
Let me say this without sugarcoating: On their own, interviews suck. Unless someone’s belligerent, antagonistic, or mentions how much they hate some aspect of your product or service, interviews will rarely give you clues into a person’s fit for your work culture or their ability to do the work you’re hiring for (unless, of course, being interviewed is part of the job). Yet that’s how many small businesses hire: by doing job postings and then interviewing the candidates.
Over the years we’ve learned a much more rigorous approach. Our goal is to make sure candidates are a good fit for our culture and can actually do the work, so we explore both, as follows:
CULTURE ASSESSMENTS.
We’ve experimented with many personality and work-style assessments to vet candidates. The Caliper Profile (which ranks people according to more than twenty leadership, interpersonal, problem-solving/decision-making, and personal-organization/time-management dimensions) and the Kolbe Index (which identifies people’s natural tendencies for how they take, or don’t take, action) are the ones we use most consistently. Even if someone has a stellar resume, we’re unlikely to hire them if their Caliper and Kolbe results don’t suggest a good fit for the organization.*
WORK PROJECTS.
If you want to know whether someone can do the work, why not ask them to actually do the work? If their Caliper and Kolbe profiles look good, we either have them help with an actual Precision Nutrition project or create a simulated project for them to help with. (Depending on the scope of the project, we’ll either pay them for this or send them a surprise gift.) Then we ask a panel of credible experts to rate their work, especially if we’re hiring to add a new capability and don’t have an internal team that knows what a great job looks like in this new domain.
Only after these two steps are complete do we interview candidates. Remember, I said interviews, alone, suck. However, interviews done to clarify what you’ve learned through personality and work assessments are useful. Indeed, most of the time we spend in interviews is about exploring, in dialogue, how a candidate’s Caliper and Kolbe results might relate to their previous work experiences. And how their work projects can give us insights into their thought processes.
Lesson 5: The hurting doesn’t stop once you hire
In Lesson 1 we discussed how it’s often best to “wait until it hurts” when considering hiring. The implication is, of course, that hiring will make the hurting stop. Sadly, that’s not true in the short term. Hiring actually makes the hurting worse.
Why does it hurt more after hiring? Well, hiring requires a lot of organizational “onboarding.” The bigger the organization, or the higher the rank, the longer the process. This means the first few months, possibly even years for executive hires, are about teaching “how things work around here.”
If you’ve ever started a new job, you know the feeling. You have to get to know:
THE PEOPLE, how they think, how they work;
THE SYSTEMS, how to log into them, how to use them, how not to break them;
YOUR ROLES AND ACCOUNTABILITIES, what’s expected of you, what’s not;
THE PRODUCTS, what they offer, what they don’t;
THE CUSTOMERS, who they are, what they’re looking for.
Finally, once you know all that, you can get to the work.
Think of the implications here if you’re the one doing the hiring. Just yesterday you were occupying the role yourself. The responsibilities were overwhelming, and you weren’t sure you could keep going for too much longer. Now you still have to do all that work. And you also have to do the work to oversee your new hire’s onboarding.
Yes, it can feel disheartening to know that if you wait until it hurts to hire, the hurting continues. At the same time, if your new hire is onboarded well, not only will all the onboarding come to an end eventually, but they’ll also soon take over the roles and responsibilities they were hired for. So hang onto that.* Difficult times feel much easier when you can see light at the end of the tunnel and you’re playing an active role in reaching it.
Lesson 6: You don’t have to become a manager, executive, or leader
As Precision Nutrition grew, I carried with me a particular narrative. I believed that:
1 as founders hire new people, they have to become managers,
2 as founders hire new managers, they have to become executives, and
3 as founders hire new executives, they have to become leaders.
In other words, I thought Phil and I had to stay “at the top” of our organization, to eventually become C-Something-Os and then eventually become presidents or chairpeople at the highest point of an imaginary Precision Nutrition totem pole.
This made me absolutely miserable. In the early days, I spent my time researching, writing, crunching numbers, and telling stories. As an introvert, I got long stretches of uninterrupted, quiet time for focused work. Then, suddenly, I was in meetings all day, every day. People wanted me to tell them what to work on, to help them prioritize their daily activities, to make decisions, to sync up the team. Workweeks would end and I’d be miserable. I hadn’t created a thing. My unique abilities weren’t being utilized. I was exhausted from the constant interpersonal work.
This affected my family life too. I didn’t have much energy or joy to share with my wife, Amanda, or our children. Finally, in the midst of a depression, I decided to call it quits. I remember writing a list of ways I could escape the scenario. It included many reasonable options like selling my shares of the company to Phil. It also included a host of unreasonable ones, the most chilling of which was, “Drive off a bridge so Amanda and the kids at least get some insurance money.”
That last one was a real wake-up call. I found a great counselor to help me through the depression. And I talked with Phil, who suggested a different way to think about my work.
Instead of worrying about having to be a manager or an executive, he encouraged me to go back to doing what I loved. We could hire managers and executives, he told me at my home, the day I shared my struggles with him. In fact, he said, hiring them would probably be much easier than trying to find someone to replace what I do best.
He was right. Now, years later, we have an awesome team of managers and executives, a fantastic group of people who allow me to work within my unique abilities without having to be something I’m not.
Keep this in mind as you consider your hiring plan. You get to make the rules within your company. If you love management and leadership, by all means do what’s required to grow in that area and tackle the challenge. If you don’t, that’s okay too. Build out your team to handle those tasks while you focus on the things that bring you, and the company, the most value.
If you’ve gotten to this stage, big high-fives! This kind of business development isn’t for the fainthearted. However, don’t let up just yet. A growing team means a new focus on teamwork.
Unfortunately, most business owners don’t think much about teamwork as they begin hiring. This makes sense as most hiring starts as a way for them to get help with necessary, important, but “lower-leverage” activities like answering phones and emails, shipping products, servicing clients, posting on social media, etc. The goal, of course, is to continue to free themselves up for the higher-leverage activities that can grow their business.
This focus on “hiring help” is what’s needed in the beginning. However, it can become a problem when the team gets bigger and everyone reports directly to the business owner. Quickly, the owner’s time becomes consumed with managing people doing lower-leverage activities. Which means there’s no time left (and no one available) to do the high-leverage growth activities.
Phil and I experienced this firsthand when Precision Nutrition grew to about thirty team members. Even though we were growing fast, we were still operating as if we had a small team of “helpers.” Everyone reported to either me or Phil, and we were the key decision makers on every project. We were constantly in meetings or having one-on-one conversations with team members.
Bottom line: We were overworked, overstressed, and doing our jobs badly. Team members were left directionless for long stretches of time, and they were starting to lose their enthusiasm as well as their confidence in us. We were all flailing and weren’t quite sure why.
I’ll never forget one meeting we had during that time. Phil and I were giving a product and marketing presentation, and I could see one of our team members rolling his eyes and shaking his head. Finally, he stood up and blurted out that our data were poorly collected, our conclusions facile. He wasn’t quite right, but his criticism did wake us up to something important. Our team members were feeling disconnected and losing sight of our vision.
A few months later, I was listening to a podcast mentioning something called the “Rule of 3 and 10,” put forward by Hiroshi Mikitani, founder of Japan’s largest e-commerce retailer. Over the years, Mikitani noticed that “everything breaks” at predictable intervals, specifically when companies triple in size. In other words, they break when you grow from one to three employees. They break again when you get to ten, again at thirty, again at one hundred, again at three hundred, and so on. Mikitani’s multibillion-dollar company now employs over twelve thousand people so he’s seen a lot of breaks.
But what does he mean by “everything breaks”? Simply that the things you were previously doing, and seemed to be working—processes for decision-making, business systems, marketing, sales, accounting, payroll, benefits, infrastructure, scheduling meetings, and leadership structures—become less effective and/or begin to produce unintended consequences.
Mikitani’s rule explained clearly why we were struggling. We were expecting the same organizational structures, work processes, and communication systems to serve thirty people just as well as they had served ten people. And they were, predictably, failing.
Further, when the team was small, we could focus nearly all our efforts on what we were putting out into the world. However, as we grew larger, we had to think about how that work got done. Specifically, we had to consider how to most effectively engineer work groups where different people, holding various roles, could effectively collaborate, make decisions, and get things done quickly at a high standard.
I still remember the first time I knew we were making progress in this area. At the end of my workday, I walked out to the end of my driveway to collect the mail. I discovered a revelation! A thick packet had arrived, outlining my family’s new PN-sponsored health insurance plan.
This was so awesome, not only because we finally had health care, but because I didn’t have to make any decisions about it. Heck, I didn’t even know anyone was working on this! Just a few months earlier, there wasn’t a single thing I didn’t know about; I was involved in every decision. But now, with our new organizational structure, the team was doing awesome things without needing my input at all.
Of course, there are entire disciplines devoted to studying how to organize teams (from functional structures to divisional structures to matrix structures to flat structures) and how to lead those teams (from top-down hierarchies to flatarchies to holacracies). If you’re operating a small business, it’s probably not necessary for you to go down the rabbit hole just yet. However, if you’re over twenty-five team members and growing fast, I highly recommend the classic Reframing Organizations by Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal. It shares four key frameworks for understanding organizations and what they need to be successful.
Are you working outside or inside the wall?
Before spending all your time on organizational work, though, it’s important to keep some perspective. Many professional managers and executives spend too much time thinking about “how we work together” and too little about the work itself. To this end, I like to think of companies as castles with walls separating the inner workings of the castle from the outside world.
Outside the wall is the content you put out into the world, including your products and services. It’s also where your customers live, how they experience your products and services, and how they perceive your company. Things like editorial content, advertising, sales, marketing, and user experience are all outside the wall activities.
Inside the wall are your team, your processes, and your policies. It’s how you are together and how you work together. Things like leadership, management, human resources, internal communications, values statements, and mission statements are all inside the wall activities.
As you grow it’s important to make sure you don’t take your eyes off what’s happening outside the wall, which is very easy to do. I often call this “playing company.” It’s where a disproportionately high amount of your resources goes into business plans, budgets, spreadsheets, slide decks, meetings, and “sync-ups” while too little goes into understanding customers, serving them well, selling them great products, and curating your reputation.
BALANCING “INSIDE THE WALL” AND “OUTSIDE THE WALL”
To make sure you find the right balance, ask yourself:
How much of my own personal time is being spent on inside the wall vs. outside the wall work?
How many of our team members are doing inside the wall vs. outside the wall work?
How much total time is spent thinking about ourselves and how we work together (inside the wall) vs. our customers and what they’re thinking, feeling, and experiencing (outside the wall)?
It’s okay for some weeks to be out of balance. However, when teams become so enamored with “working on ourselves” that they chronically neglect “working for the customers,” companies fail fast. That’s why it’s important to always get back into balance. If push comes to shove, and you need to choose one over the other, what’s going over the wall should win out. Without customers giving you money, there’s no castle, no wall, and no one inside it.
Remember, these five business skills are essential for figuring out what’s worth spending your time on, attracting new clients and customers, supporting your fast-growing client list, recruiting new team members, and making sure your team can do great work.
Again, while not every skill outlined here will be relevant to you today, consider this chapter a look into your future. Think of it as advanced preparation for what’s to come as you develop and grow your business.
* I’m a big advocate of counseling as it’s been a part of my life since I was a teenager. While it’s still a somewhat taboo subject in some communities, and therefore too few people talk about it, I’ve learned that most of the people I respect and admire have extensive histories working with counselors. In fact, I think it’s so important for personal development, and deep health, that Precision Nutrition sets aside a counseling budget for new team members and strongly encourages them to use it.
* These are the activities you know are important and will produce a high return but you simply didn’t make time for them, so they never made it onto your calendar.
* I should also note that forgetting important details is also amplified. I remember hearing from a client who reached out to her previous nutrition coach for help with increasing protein intake. The coach recommended chicken and fish. The only problem? The client was vegan and had mentioned this multiple times. I’m sure her coach wasn’t trying to offend her. But that was the result. From this I was reminded that memory isn’t always reliable. That’s why we built a coaching platform that allows coaches to see all important information while interacting with clients. No remembering necessary.
* However, as one of my colleagues always reminds me: Often people build something they think is valuable and awesome, but because they didn’t spend time to consider how to talk about it or who it helps (and if that person even wants that help), they end up releasing something no one will pay for. So remember parts one and two: Know what people want. Then make something awesome for them (that you know they’ll want).
* We’re a virtual company that works remotely and, therefore, team members can work anywhere. At the same time, I sometimes prefer to start with a local recruiter who has global reach so that reference checks, in-person meetings, etc. are easier.
* Caliper, in particular, offers a valuable service where their in-house experts will review a candidate’s results, in the context of your needs and culture, to help you make sense of whether someone is a fit for your organization or not.
* Part of successful onboarding relates back to system building. The more effective and thorough your systems are, the easier it is to onboard. Because, while not hiring until it hurts is one thing, it’s quite another not to even think about, or plan for, future hires.