Olympic swimmers need coaches to succeed. Smart business owners know they need Business Coaches to win big.

The Outcome

Jamie Short is a changed man. And so is his business and financial outlook. He has achieved an enormous amount in such a short time.

If you were to ask him what were the main benefits he received from having an ActionCOACH Business Coach, this is what he’d say.

Take a look at it closely:

• Increased my turnover by 500% in twelve months.
• Increased my team from being a one-man band to managing 15 people.
• Saved over $100,000 in purchasing a business.
• Went from no strategic alliances to having over 6 that actively refer clients.
• Being able to systemize my business.
• 90% success rate with my marketing campaigns (and being able to measure the success as well).
• Increased my client base 650% in twelve months.

That’s not bad in any body’s language. He now has a profitable business that works without him. He has a gym, which was his dream goal, and has a team so he doesn’t have to do all the work himself. In fact, he can now even have a holiday for a couple of weeks each year, if he wants to. And he is turning over more per month than he was per year when he first got serious about his business.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s more of what he has to say.

“Looking back over the year, I can say that it wasn’t all smooth sailing, and there were some long hours doing homework (that I set for myself). ActionCOACH always loves to test the boundaries and find the limits (that’s why we get on … I think), but it was very rewarding.”

To see what has been accomplished and to have the future mapped out is so inspiring and fulfilling. Over the past 12-months, we have achieved an incredible amount of work. I have brought a gym with my new business partner and saved over $100,000 on the purchase price. Our services have expanded and we now offer the following (in addition to personal training, either in one-on-one or in groups):

• Massage (work or at home)
• Corporate health services (team building, massage, health seminars, exercise groups)
• Success coaching
• Packaged meals
• Nutritional analysis
• Yoga and boxing classes
• Health and fitness assessments
• Personalized exercise programs

“I could be here all day going on about how much my life and business has changed, but until you experience it yourself, you will never know the real benefits of having an ActionCOACH Business Coach.”

Brad Sugars comments on how this business thrived with the help of ActionCOACH.

Jamie came to ActionCOACH through a referral of a mutual friend. He was a very concerned at how he was going to pay for coaching as he was only turning over $35,000 a year.

Jamie was so full of passion and energy, however, he lacked the direction and focus to keep him on track to achieve his goals.

He needed to free himself of the $20 per hour jobs he was doing. Initially he had to do more personal training sessions with his free time to increase his cashflow. And he needed a more professional image to go with his profile. The price rise ActionCOACH put in place would make him the most expensive trainer around.

ActionCOACH introduced scripts and developed a referral program, which worked outstandingly well.

ActionCOACH started to test and measure everything, and concentrated on improving his time management/self-management skills.

ActionCOACH built strategic alliances with other health professionals as a way of generating new leads, as Jamie didn’t have the cashflow to invest in marketing. His conversion rate also needed some work.

As a way of increasing cashflow, ActionCOACH put in place some guarantees, and produced 10 paid-in-advance training session packs (at a reduced rate) to increase client’s training sessions per week. This worked very well. We discovered from our testing and measuring that the business was 90% referral. This convinced us to develop more strategies aimed at increasing the flow of referrals to the business. We produced an e-mail newsletter, and tried several different types of flyers, which didn’t work so we dropped them and went back to what was working – referrals and strategic alliances.

ActionCOACH certainly faced some interesting challenges along the way. Jamie’s time was limited, as he was already working over 70 hours per week, so we had to free him up from the non-income producing stuff. This was not easy, as he didn’t have anyone to delegate to.

We introduced systems to his business and got him to use scripts consistently. Keeping him focused on his weekly goals without letting himself set another dozen each week was also a major challenge. So was trying to get some balance back into his life.

Jamie’s passion and focus due to the clarity of his goals, I think, was the main driving factor for him. Coaching him was like having a tiger by the tail most of the time.

How does a gym go from chaos to control? Discover here ...

The Moment Of Truth

I was busy and earned a good little package, but I knew there was more. I was doing all my 30 or 40 sessions per week, trying to do the marketing, finances, admin and everything else. I was wearing all the hats and not enjoying it at all.

I had enough pain. It was time to call for some help.

I have always known a Business Coach did for a living, but I was scared to take the plunge and to take on coaching services. Yes, there was a lot of fear that came up. Issues like, can I afford it? Plus the fear of failure and thoughts of what other people where going to say.

Then I attended a sales training course hosted by ActionCOACH. During the workshop, the presenter mentioned a few keynotes, like playing above the line and taking responsibility for my actions and having ownership. This really struck some emotions; I had certainly had enough pain running my own business.

So after finally making the call, my ActionCOACH Business Coach and I got under way. The Alignment Report was first, and as the saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Well, I certainly didn’t know what had to be done to run a successful business. ActionCOACH and I put together a plan and away we went.

The first thing we did was to increase prices (wow, what a head shift that was!). I quickly became one of the most expensive personal trainers in Sydney and was defiantly the most expensive in the main gym where I was training.

People certainly took notice of that. Other aspects of the plan involved filling in quiet parts of the day, such as the down times during lunch time and in the early afternoon with special training sessions. Forming strong strategic alliances proved to be very successful within the first 3 to 4 months.

I had increased my revenue (turnover) by 20% in a couple of months and was testing and measuring all inquiries. This provided me with very valuable information down the track.

I then began to realize the importance of working ON the business instead of IN it.

I began training up another trainer and getting him to do some of my sessions as well as more work. This freed me up to do some marketing.

As the months passed, I found myself getting busier and busier. I had formed some strong strategic alliances and was receiving great referrals from them. Systems were in place and they were working very well. Referrals from existing clients were coming in, as we did a promotion involving massages for those who referred on clients who signed up for a set amount of sessions. This was so successful that I had to slow down the marketing campaign – I had become busier than I could cope with.

However, the real challenge began with the next step – acquiring a studio.

Ever since I was 14-years old, I had a dream of owning my own gym – a place where people would come to train, have fun, and enjoy hanging out at.

Well, this dream came true.

I teamed up with an old friend whom I went through university with and played rugby against. We decided to tackle the gym together. We merged our businesses and formed Ignite Health Pry Ltd.

We were then on the hunt … with my ActionCOACH Business Coach being the General back at the Officer’s Mess, and us being the front line soldiers being sent out to receive all the hits and war wounds while searching for, and finding, a business and business premises.

We wanted to start up our own gym from scratch, but my coach convinced us to find an existing one that was doing poorly – one whose owner’s wanted to sell for a reason – as this way we’d get a better deal than having to wear the set-up costs of a new one.

Every Saturday we’d read the “Business For Sale” section of the paper as well as “Business for Sale” magazines.

We looked at dozens over the next few months, putting in offers that were all rejected. Then one day we finally came across a hot one. The ad read, “Gym for Sale. Require urgent sale for personal reasons. Great price.”

Well, after looking at the business and using ActionCOACH’s business buying checklist, this looked too good to be true.

After 8-weeks of negotiations and going back and forth from the solicitors, accountants, financial lenders, and of course, ActionCOACH, we struck a deal.

This is how it worked:

The original asking price for the business was $160,000. Equipment was insured for just over $100,000 and would sell second-hand for around $80,000 as most of it was only 18-months old. They wanted $50,000 for the goodwill/income it was producing. The business had been going for 6 years, however, it showed little profit – the systems were in a mess. The owners were a husband and wife team and she was pregnant with their 3rd child. Furthermore, she was ready to give birth in the next few weeks – now that’s real urgency to sell. Initially my business partner and I were prepared to pay up to $120,000 for the business, as we loved it, its location, and its potential. However, my coach wouldn’t let us do that and he kept saying we needed to get a better deal.

It was as if it was his money that was on the line.

My coach asked what our absolute dream price to pick this business up at would be. He wanted to know the dream price at which we could sell it for a profit the next day without doing anything to it. I replied $70,000, so my coach asked how good would it be if we could get it for $60,000?

I got very excited and asked how could we possibly do that, as the owners had already knocked back offers in excess of $100,000.

My coach said those buyers had now gone, and the owners wanted to sell urgently, so all we had to do was to find out what, other than money, they wanted, and then give it to them, provided we got the business for a great price.

We came up with a strategy and said this was the best offer they were going to get and we were their only option to take over the lease. The final price was agreed on at $60 000, with a clause that we had 30 days from the agreement date to walk away before exchanging contracts.

The learning curve that Darren (my business partner) and I went through was absolutely incredible. I have learnt more in the past 3- to 6-months than I did over the past 5 years of operating my own personal training business.

The gym now consists features equipment on one whole floor. We offer a unique service where we guarantee that one of our expert trainers will look after four members at once, each having their own program depending on their goals and needs. This is a guaranteed personalized service. We also offer yoga groups, boxing groups, massage, as well as a solarium. We have nine trainers, hundreds of members and made a profit within the first 2-months of operation.

When I first started with Pat, the business had a turnover of about $35,000 a year.

We now do that in a month.

Our new vision is to have four of these gyms around Sydney within the next 3 or 4 years. And by that I mean we actually buy the property first, and then establish the gym at the premises.

A true business is a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you.
- Brad Sugars -

The Business
Name: Fitness Shortly (now Ignite Health Pty Ltd), New South Wales, Australia
Owner: Jamie Short
Business Sector: Health & Fitness

The Challenge
Being self-employed has a certain ring to it that many find appealing.

But running your own show is not a bed of roses. A self-employed person normally starts out with just one employee.
And that suits them fine. There is no one else to worry about, and none of those other people who make all the mistakes, it’s just a single person.

The self-employed person usually trusts no one other than themselves to get the job done. They’ll say things like: “I am my business.” Or, in their sales pitch: “You’ll be dealing directly with me and I’m the owner of the business.” Or, “If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.” Or, “Everything is under my control so I know that it’s done right.”

Being self-employed is usually the first jump on the entrepreneurial ladder and for most, it’s the only jump.

In fact, most entrepreneurs never seem to get past this level of growth in their business.

The truth is, you really can’t call this scenario a business; you’ve really got to call it a JOB. And of course, you do know what J-O-B stands for, don’t you? Just Over Broke.

What’s more, this job is most probably one of the worst jobs in the world.

I think this quote puts it best, taken from one of my live seminars: “Most people thought they worked for an idiot BEFORE they started their own business.”

I really don’t think most people who start their own business know what they’re getting themselves into. In fact, most look at it as something glamorous, exciting, and with such a sense of newfound freedom that they’re fooled into believing wealth is just a few days, weeks or months away.

The self-employed person is trapped by the limited “doing” vision that is a part of being an employee. As an example, computer technicians who start their own businesses usually see themselves servicing people’s computers and would be extremely happy if they could get enough business to keep themselves, and only themselves, extremely busy.

This results in your business life feeling just like a see-saw. You’ll spend half your life chasing the work, or doing marketing, sales and administration.

Then you’ll have so much work to do you’ll have to flip over and start doing the work…

Doing the “work” is one side of the see-saw, while “sales and marketing” is the other.

Chase the work, do the work, chase the work, do the work, chase the work, do the work … and so on …

It’s this see-saw that stops a self-employed entrepreneur from ever really getting ahead. It’s also this see-saw that gets self-employed people to make one of two decisions: either give it up and go back and get a job, or take the plunge and jump in at the deep end of business and make the decision to grow their business by moving up the ladder.

This is what Jamie Short did.

This is what he has to say …

Jamie’s Story
I was pretty much a one-man band. I had one guy doing some personal training sessions for me, and that guy was me! I was the technician, manager, owner and entrepreneur all at the same time. The different hats that I was wearing could have filled an entire hat store.

So, what exactly do I do, you may ask? Well, if you ever get up really early, around 5 or 6am, you might see those crazy people running up and down the beach or in the park. Yes, that’s me, encouraging people to get into shape at weird and ungodly times of the day.

I spent the other half of my day running around Sydney training clients at their homes, their offices or at a couple of different gyms. I didn’t have many systems in place at all, and the reality was it was going to be a miracle if I could achieve my goal of owning my own gym in the next 12-months.

“I truly exercised massive discipline as well as made some very tough decisions that turned things around,” Pat explains.

Shane says some walls are harder for some people to breakthrough than others.

“But when you get there, it can be one of the most amazing experiences of your life. I am not the same person I was 12 months ago. I truly have to thank ActionCOACH for patience and perseverance.

For the year, I recorded over 3 times the revenue (turnover) of my previous best year – that’s a 300% increase in 12-months, and we are on target to double that again.”

Shane now has a profitable business with a team of 3 employees and more than 30 contractors on the books.
He now only provides quotes and organizes the work – he doesn’t work with tools himself anymore. He is making 3 to 5 times more per month than he was 12-months ago, and he’s not working as hard for it – physically or mentally.

He made enough money to purchase an investment property with his father and to start renovating it, and plans to sell it when it’s completed, and to buy, and renovate, more. He’s certainly come a long way!

He got one my tapes, 3 Steps To Profitable Marketing, and performed a diagnostic consultation to asses his business.

He soon realized he couldn’t afford NOT to take on a coach based on what he wanted to achieve and what he had achieved so far.

The outcome of this led his coach to recommend he project a highly professional image. He needed to learn scripts, start Testing and Measuring, and thinking about better time and self-management strategies. He also started to build strategic alliances with suppliers to get deals.

He thought his conversion rate (from prospects to clients) was 70%, but we tested it and found it to be around 30%.

Shane needed to change his beliefs about sales and get more confidence. He also needed to put in place some guarantees, do a cashflow analysis and increase his networking.

This certainly presented him with some challenges, especially concerning his beliefs about selling, business, customers and money. Getting him off the tools and onto the business was another major challenge. Like getting him to finish goals before he started new ones, and to use scripts consistently. we needed him to sacrifice some recreation time to focus on achieving his goals.

The coach overcame these challenges by being persistent. Sometimes, great coaches just won’t let you off the hook, even though at times it can feel like you and your coach are treading water with the growth of the business.

In the end, our coaches have learned sometimes if they let clients go forward too quickly, nothing gets done properly and there are bigger problems than you had before you started.

So, how did Shane get his business moving in the right direction?

Networking breakfasts.

These produced one of his largest sources of new business for the first 6 months. The coach then got him to call-up past clients to ask for testimonials and referrals.

After years of moving between working for customers and other builders (and some travelling overseas – something someone might normally do in their mid twenties) I became hugely frustrated with both my financial situation and myself. I absolutely knew that I had the brains, and the ability, to achieve more than this (as I had with sport through my teens and early twenties).

It was this raw dissatisfaction that drove me to finding out where I was going wrong and to do something about it.

I decided to take responsibility for my own situation, as no one else created the mess I was in or my feeling of dissatisfaction. I could simply not believe I was 29 and had less in the bank than when I was 23.

It actually began to depress me as well as frustrate me. It was at that point that I made a decision to change and get some business help.

Having made the decision to learn how to build, own and operate a successful business, I began to attend to a lot of seminars and signed on to many business development programs. One of these seminars was hosted by ActionCOACH, and the presenter spoke of a business coaching success story that just happened to be in the same industry as the one I wanted to create my business in. It just clicked. I realized that what I needed to do was enlist ActionCOACH’s help.

Basically, ActionCOACH had to start from scratch with me. I only used a few business principles at that time, and mostly thought about what I was producing and not about the business side of things. So the challenge for me was to truly start thinking like a businessperson and not as a builder.

I found this very hard indeed after 15 years on the tools.

My ActionCOACH Business Coach began by suggesting I read specific books to educate myself as much as possible.

This, he said, would get me up to speed with the business tools I would need to get started on the right path. He also suggested I set some simple and effective weekly goals to get things moving quickly. Create some scripts, get new business cards, put my prices up, create a more efficient quoting system, charge for design proposals, place some ads in the local paper to generate leads, and work on my referral strategies.

We developed a Plan Of Action. This included starting weekly coaching sessions and getting real about my goals, which I set as follows: to go from being a contractor turning over $40,000 to $60,000 per year to a Business Owner with a company turning over $1.8 million per year in 3 years.

I needed to have a grasp of the business language and principals, and I had to learn quickly. I wanted to get started right there and then. I was eager to get going as I had discovered there was a way to grow my business. Luckily I didn’t, and I now see why my Business Coach held me back from diving straight in as long as he could.

By setting goals of books to read, tapes to listen to and things to achieve was just excellent. The 2-day business workshop I attended was so good I did it twice during my 12-month coaching program – I got more out of it the second time. You don’t often invest 2-days straight working on your business, and it was the best thing I could have done.

Introducing changes to the business and my routine was the single biggest challenge I faced, even though I wanted to be successful and to achieve my goals.

The discipline and effort I needed in comparison to how I was doing things previously was a massive challenge in the beginning. I did not adjust well to it and it took time. Even though I wanted the outcome, the reality of the work I had to do to achieve it was overwhelming at times to say the least. My Business Coach could have sacked me a dozen times for disagreements and not getting done what was needed, but he didn’t.

It just took me a long time to realize how being slow to implement change was killing my new business.

After missing a few of my targets and being very disappointed, I began to truly see that, as well as making changes in the business, I had to change myself if I wanted to reach my goals.

It was only after seeing my failures and truly understanding why they occurred, that I committed more time to my business and changed my routine to suit the business more than myself.

So when it came time to do some Testing and Measuring, I realized we didn’t have any real benchmarks to work off. But we started with lead generation and conversion, and continued from there.

And wow, from someone who thought they got just about every contract they tendered for, the raw percentages were a real eye opener.

My coach simply smiled, as he knew we had plenty of room for improvement.

I have been in the Building Industry for 15 years now, but I like to say I’ve only been in the Business Industry for 18 months. I believe our market will continue growing rapidly as the population grows. The need for homes is growing, but there is not enough room. Existing homes are aging rapidly, as well as increasing in value and this, in turn, is resulting in an increase in demand for renovation work.

A big advantage for my business is that it is widely accepted in the community that tradespeople are generally slack with communication, slack in appearance, and slack in attitude. It is widely accepted that the trades, in comparison to other industries, are unprofessional and that good tradespersons are very rare. Just ask anyone if they have had a bad experience with a tradesperson.

I see this as an opportunity. If you can exceed expectations and do the job sooner than they expect, you’ll get great referrals from customers in what is generally a referral-based business. This alone has contributed substantially to the growth of Beautiful Bathrooms Of Sydney.

My biggest challenge was, and still is, finding and training like-minded and motivated people. Like many industries, this is the greatest challenge, especially if you have a huge desire to grow. How much growth? Our primary aim is to be the industry leader in Sydney, then Brisbane, Melbourne and Auckland through phenomenal service and a referral-based business.

So how did I get there?

From being a one man show!

When I first started out on my own, I was a sole contractor and spent most of my time working for someone else. What little time I had left, I spent trying to build up my own clients. I mostly contracted to large building firms and found dissatisfaction in them reaping the rewards from all my hard work, with little benefit in return. This pattern went on for several years. I knew there was a path to success and financial independence, but I was not on it.

Before I started this business, my financial situation was dismal. And so was my commitment to that side of my business. I lacked direction, I would go from one job to the next and I had no plan. I was in debt when I started, and I had to pay for coaching with my credit card. Yet I just knew I had to make some changes, as what I was doing on my own was not getting me where I wanted to go.

There are no secrets in life or business. Just information you don’t know yet.
- Brad Sugars -

The Business
Name: Beautiful Bathrooms Of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Owner: Shane Besson
Business Sector: Building

The Challenge
Shane Besson lives in the Northern Beaches region of the Sydney metropolitan area, 40 minutes north of the Sydney CBD. And because he is in the business of renovating bathrooms, his business has no fixed address. He has no shop front, rather he likes to concentrate his efforts on the large business zone of the Sydney CBD and Northern Suburbs.

His client base consists mostly of homeowners and investors. With this comes every type of person from the young first home buyers to business people with particular requirements, right through to retirees who appreciate a person who is pleasant to deal with. As you can imagine, all these different groups have differing requirements, which makes operating successfully in this business, a major challenge.

Time is a big issue for most people these days. There is never enough time and everyone seems constantly busy. Recognising this turned out to be one of Shane’s major advantages as far as his business was concerned – it gave him the opportunity to excel by taking up as little of it as possible by being swift and impressive with construction. It’s also important to strike the right balance with your communication efforts too, as most people don’t want too much or too little of it from you. Shane says that he finds people in his community to be extremely busy -and they like to feel important.

“You may laugh at how simple this is,” he says. “The next time you deal with any business, remember how important you felt with them.”

So how has he coped? How has this typical builder-turned-businessman managed to survive in today’s fast-paced high-tech world? How has this tradesman managed to adapt to the rigours of the business world?

This is his story.

Their goals are to franchise the company, first in the Sydney Metropolitan area, then within the state of New South Wales, before going national and international.

The owners also aim to work more on the business instead of in it. They also aim to become financially free and to have other business interests besides this company.

During their first year with ActionCOACH, they completed a business plan and doubled their profits. They have also bought a factory at Blacktown, and now have a boardroom, two offices upstairs, a lunchroom, an area for storage and a reception area downstairs.

This is something that, at the end of the day, they can call their own. This has been all achieved by doing all the hard work themselves.

But not only hard work; a lot of smart work on the part of ActionCOACH for helping them achieve these results.

Moving into their factory in Blacktown has given them a new perspective on where they are heading and what they are actually doing.

They also underwent changes as far as their team was concerned. Some of their team didn’t like the changes that were taking place; the owners were probably stricter and the company was structured better. These people have since departed and a new team with very clear guidelines as to what their role within the company is, and who fit in with their new structure, has been established.

The company is now running very smoothly with high work ethics, high morale and everyone is working towards achieving the same goals. Each team member is rewarded for the input they provide.

The company now employs 11 team members. They have appointed an Operations Manager who oversees the day-to-day running of the company out in the field, while John is currently the C.E.O and Scott is working on franchising the business. They can now see more light at the end of the tunnel and this, they say, is going to be one of their greatest achievements.

First Choice Protective Coatings is now one of the largest graffiti removal companies in Australia. The owners say they have achieved a lot more than they would ever have hoped, thanks to ActionCOACH.

Their turnover is higher, their profits are higher, their morale is higher still and their business sense and knowledge has grown dramatically.

And they’ve re-named the company Graffiti Off. They say this was very definitely money well spent.

One last thing; thanks to taking a Business Coach on board, Scott has brought his first luxury car, a beautiful Jaguar.

For him, life’s exciting, and it’s fun.