Move the line, not the mountain

One of the owners on my Tuesday call was describing her town. Near the bottom of the country for education and for health. Diabetes and blood pressure everywhere you look.

Her read was that maybe twenty or thirty percent of her community will ever listen to her, and she was trying to build something that could reach the other seventy.

I stopped her, because I was about to save her a year and a lot of money.

You're not going to solve that problem for those people. It doesn't matter what you build. You could walk to their house, hand them the injections, and physically move their legs for them, and you would still not solve that problem for them.

They are VALLEYS away from anything you're offering.

I know how that sounds. I also know it because I did exactly this to myself four or five years ago, pointing my marketing and my goals at that population as hard as I could, and it went nowhere for a long time before I'd admit what was happening.

Here's the reframe that fixed it.

If somebody is willing to walk into your gym at all, they're already the top five percent of your town. That's how far out on the edge our whole industry lives. So stop thinking about the bottom seventy percent. Start thinking: I'm currently reaching the top fifteen. What would it take to reach the top twenty-five?

Top doesn't mean richest, and it doesn't mean fittest. It means most willing to attempt a change.

Moving your message one notch wider is a real project with a beginning and an end. You can finish it this quarter. Reaching the people who are valleys away is a wish with a budget attached to it.

And there's a piece of this that changes what you post. Most of us lead with our best result. The hundred-pound before-and-after, the athlete, the person who's here five days a week and loves it.

That person is the FURTHEST possible human from the one you're trying to reach. Your best result reads as "not me" to exactly the audience you're chasing.

If the people in your town have diabetes and high blood pressure, talk about the members at your gym who don't eat perfectly and are still getting somewhere. Talk about the people who don't look like athletes and are doing fine. Speak evidence about people who resemble the people you're actually talking to.

You don't argue somebody into believing it'll work for them. You show them somebody they recognize.

One last thing, because I don't want this to read as writing anybody off. There is a way to serve the people you can't sell to. Make enough money first, then go run a free bootcamp in that neighborhood once a week. Charity work is a thing a healthy business buys you. It is not a thing you can build a business out of, and I've watched good people go broke confusing the two.

Nick

Nick Habich owns Shark Bite Fitness in Cape Coral, Florida, and coaches gym owners in Pathfinder Collective. These notes go out to his email list on Tuesdays and Thursdays.