Build a Reputation First and a Business Second

The objective of any business is to build a positive reputation with its customers and then enjoy growth and profitability.  The stronger your reputation, the better your profits and more stable your business is. 

 All Personal Trainers should answer this one question;

What did I DO today to improve my reputation with my customers and prospects?

If you can identify several actions that will have improved your reputation and none that will have impeded it – bingo – your business will improve and growth and profit are only a matter of time.  Crazy simple.

Let’s take a look at this in a graphic (to view full size graphic click here)

Here you can see that if we all started in business at the same time, all new to the same club, then our reputation and eventual success would be related.  What you’ll also notice is that once you get below the ‘neutral line’ it takes more and more time and effort to get back above the line and start growing a positive reputation.  I’ve labelled these three cases; care at the start, care too late, and don’t care.  The care too late group do a disproportionate amount of work fixing up their reputation by taking lots and lots of actions to prove, against the tide (their historical perceptions), that they are in fact credible.  My General Manager describes this as ‘trying to turn the Titanic’ – not much fun if you want to make running and building your business easy.

Using someone’s reputation to pre-judge them is just a function of our socialisation and brain function.  As humans we use group thinking to establish the potential negatives of any engagement – we don’t really trust everyone the same, we tend to trust those who are obviously trusted by others.  We do this because our brains have learnt to associate safety with numbers and actions.  If 15 people are using Bob, and only 5 are using Sue, Bob is more popular and given trust is an element of that – implicitly Bob has a better reputation.  If I then watched Bob in the gym and saw him work exceptionally well with his clients, and if I then asked some of his clients how good Bob was and they were positive – well hell, Bob is on easy street. 

Sue may not be working with a lot of clients and when she does she’s jittery and awkward.  I can read the clients are indifferent to the experience and when I ask them, they don’t say anything bad about Sue, but they don’t sing her praises either.  Sue is getting stitched up because her reputation is in reverse.  Notice you don’t have to have a negative reputation – just indifferent or apathetic responses are more than enough to undermine your business.  The lack of ‘positive’ is in fact – ‘negative’ – with a reputation there really is no ‘middle ground’.

Can you see how reputation works – how it is the net of all the actions you’ve taken and the perceptions they’ve caused.  Can you see how if you get below neutral it’s going to take time and effort – well beyond the norm – to get you back to a feasible business building reputation.

I know this because it’s how I’ve learnt to do business – it’s also my natural setting.  I want the people I’m trying to help to get what they need, when they need it, how they need it and enjoy being a customer of mine.  When I’m building a business I want my prospective customer to enjoy knowing me, liking me, and trusting me. 

At the moment one of my companies is expanding into a new country.  The market we are moving in to is five times the size of the market we are currently operating in.  Every time we grow or expand a business we set down a ‘proof of concept’ stage which is where we attach a timeline to the key reputation building outcome of our business. 

As an example, in one year we will be the preferred and most trusted supplier of Personal Trainers in this location.  Once that is goal is set, that is all we focus on.  We still market, convert, deliver, and support but all of this activity is defined one year later by a single measure – in this example we will ask ‘do our graduates and the workplaces they go in to trust us more than anyone else – is our reputation bad, good or great’.  I could virtually hang our future prosperity off this outcome (in fact I have).  A year is a long time but the business I’m involved with is medium sized.  If I were a Personal Trainer just starting out – I’d set the following as a 1 month goal:

“Do the staff, members, my prospects and current clients trust me, enjoy working with me, like me more this month than last?”

For us, earning our reputation in the first year means our business in the second year (subject to the usual financial and business planning) can grow with very little risk – simply because we have the best reputation for what we do.  Reputation oils the wheels of growth and prosperity and the opposite can happen too.  Your reputation can completely kill your business no matter how hard you work at it.  Here’s how.

You market to a bunch of people.  They show some interest and in the process of qualifying whether to invest time and interest in you they ‘ask around’ about you.  The word on the street is you’re just okay, a little money grubbing, generally nice but not totally committed to clients at all times.  Wow, good bye leads.  This happens all the time in Personal Training.  My experience was that most of my clients were sold to by my existing clients because after I had approached them, before they agreed to do some work with me, they would ask around the membership – particularly when they saw one of my clients swing into the changing rooms. ‘What’s Steve like, is he a good trainer?’ You are always just one grimace away from going backward – your reputation does precede you.  I call this ‘qualified purchasing’ which simply means, in today’s highly connected and highly sceptical world, no one can operate beyond their immediate reputation for any period of time because it’s far too easy to find out about you from those who use your services.

This is how virtually anyone can enter highly populated market spaces.  Because they simply have lots of companies with average reputations bashing away at them.  Notice I said ‘highly populated’ not ‘highly competitive’.  To be truly competitive you have to have a gold plated reputation.  Otherwise you are just holding some customers until someone turns up and does it better – grows a reputation, oils the wheels, and the customers slip through your fingers.  Have you ever seen a Personal Trainer go into a ‘highly populated’ club (where lots of PTs are already operating) and build a business without any problem at all – they know how to take the actions that quickly build a gold plated reputation.

So, how does a reputation get built?  One word: “actions!”  Look, I see all these trainers, companies, and websites promising they are ‘the trusted xyz of abc’ or ‘a specialist in abc’ or the ‘recognised leader in xyz’.  We have to realise that all of this holds absolutely no water at all in the torrent of marketing the average consumer now sees.  They do not trust you one iota more if you tell them you are trusted.  They do not like you because you say you are likable.  The currency of trust is credibility and credibility is earned over time and through consistent customer centric action.  So, forget the ‘marketing, branding, values, appearance’ rhetoric.  Simply take actions that will forever support and build your reputation.  Here are a few examples on the gym floor;

• Approach and help anyone on the gym floor if you have time (if not, make it) and make sure they are exercising safely and effectively
• Tidy up after yourself every time you train or you train someone
• Be open and communicative at all times on the gym floor – talking to your client, members, staff, making introductions – keep a balance, don’t play favourites, show you are willing to engage with anyone
• Be honest and open with staff and colleagues about what you know and what you don’t – show them what you are good at and don’t ‘fake it’
• Be friendly for the sake of being friendly – say hi to new faces, make sure they have what they need, go out of your way to engage members and clients whenever you see them by using their names and acknowledging them
• Pick up on things your client might want or need and organise them as surprises or support – don’t let any opportunity pass you by to make your clients’ lives happier, better, safer, more full of good and lacking in bad
• Walk in every day with your game face on, be happy, engaging, caring, enjoy yourself – this was your choice, this is your opportunity, go have fun
• Don’t blob in the gym or even in the vicinity of the gym – blob at home with the door locked and the TV on – the implicit messages you send are more powerful than what you say
• Praise effort, work, consistency all the things that contribute to the results clients and members achieve – this inherently positive vibe and ‘growth minded’ approach makes you a magnet for action takers

That’s a pretty damn simple recipe.  Your reputation is the net of all your previous actions and the perceptions of those actions by the market in which you operate.  To enhance your reputation there is no amount of graphic design, copy writing, technical qualifications or beer that can overcome an uncaring, negative, indifferent, or grumpy history of actions. 

If you are starting out in Personal Training, or if you want to give your business a bit of a shot in the arm, then test your reputation by thinking very carefully about what your clients and the members you’ve met would say if someone asked that powerful question ‘hey, what’s that PT Steven like’?