74: 9 unique ways to make your business stand out (to get more clients)

Dan Williams explores nine powerful ways fitness business owners can stand out by being truly different, because in today’s crowded market, being better isn’t enough. For each area of differentiation we’ll look at a well known business case study, and Dan will brainstorm some unique fitness business ideas.

5 things you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why competing by being ‘better’ traps you in a red ocean, and how to escape it.
• How to define your unique selling proposition (USP) with one sentence.
• The nine key areas where your fitness business can stand out from the crowd.
• Creative, real-world examples of differentiation across gyms, PTs, EPs, yoga and martial arts studios.
• Why living your USP through repeatable actions is more effective than generic claims.

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Episode Transcription:

The single most important thing that people need to get right when they’re in the early stages of building a successful fitness business is also the most difficult thing.

It’s one of the very first things I work on with the business owners I mentor, and is without a doubt, the thing they struggle with most.

This incredibly important, yet incredibly difficult task, is how to make your business different.

So today, I want to make it easier for you, by giving you the nine ways you can be unique.

I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of businesses either fail, or just as bad, slowly fade away into obscurity while paying their owners a fraction of what they deserve based on the work they put in.

It’s hard to be different. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and if everyone was doing it, you wouldn’t be different any more.

And yet, if you’re not different, you have no advantage over your competition. Why would people choose your 24 hour gym over the one on another street corner? Why would they choose you as a PT over the ten other options they’ve got in the same gym? Why would they come to your semi private classes, when there are five other businesses offering the same service within 2km of your door?

You might have heard me talk about this before. It’s a topic I often explore when I’m giving live, in person talks and keynotes to business owners, and I recently covered the need to be unignorably different in episode 69 of The Business of Fitness Podcast, “Delivering an Experience: The Strategy of ‘Being Different’”.

If you haven’t listened to that one, I recommend you check it out, because it’s a great accompaniment to this episode.

But basically, I spoke about a blue ocean strategy. Most business owners are in a red ocean, where they’re fighting with their competitors to try and be the best. There’s blood in the water – hence the ‘red’ ocean. Everyone looks the same, competes on the same points, and fights to be slightly better. But being ‘good’ isn’t good enough. The goal isn’t to be ten times better than your competitors, it’s to step out of the fight completely. The goal is to be different. To build something so unique, and so remarkable, that you create your own blue ocean, a space with no competition.

In that episode, I gave two action steps. The first is to define your USP – your unique selling proposition, and the second was to make of list of the actions you take in your business to make that USP true.

To define your USP, the exercise is simple. Complete this sentence. ‘The thing that we do that is different from everyone else is…’.

But as I’ve said, finding the thing that makes you different is really hard. When I ask people what makes them different, I’m met with boringly predictable answers. Boutique gyms tell me they have the best community. Personal Trainers tell me they’re empathetic, offer an individualised approach and meet people where they are. Again and again, I hear words and phrases like ‘individualised care’, ‘going the extra mile’, ‘building relationships’, ‘a science-based approach’, ‘world class programming’, ‘professional coaches’, ‘a non intimidating environment’, ‘amazing communication’, and the list goes on and on.

But this is what everyone is saying, so it’s not different.

It’s brainstorming your unique selling proposition that is the challenging part. Working out what it is that makes you stand alone.

And in that previous episode about being unignorably different I teased at nine different areas you could be different in. They were: Your target market, price point or revenue model. The problem you solve, the tools you use to s