So up until this point we’ve established, and I hope you agree with me, that it’s better in general, in most scenarios, if not every scenario, to do less things in a better way than to do more things less well. So less is more, but to pick really good things and do them really well is better than to try to do everything at once and getting all caught up and not doing anything well. Or as a good friend of mine once said, “Whole ass one thing instead of half assing everything”.
But we haven’t yet discussed how best to discern which things make that short list because it’s easy to add and add and add to a laundry list of offerings and before you know it everyones confused, including your clients. The qualification process becomes less complicated when you’ve already decided to offer everything. What’s another stick on top of the wood pile at that stage?
But when you’re really forced, as with anything in life, to boil your priorities down to the biggest bang for your buck, very best, it’s MUCH tougher to make that list. Probably one of the hardest questions ever, is being asked your top three movies or something like that, your top three actors, your top three sports stars of any given sports, who’s the best three fighters of all time or whatever. It’s more difficult to whittle stuff down to what’s the best?
But when you start to see the keys for selection, it becomes easier. Like anything, there is a pattern, and this is only my personal experience, but for me within the context of the fitness industry, there are certain things that jump out. There’s certain red flags of low quality, and there’s certain real markers of high quality that seem to consistently reappear in both areas and consistently repeat themselves and be correlated with either quality or sub-standard.
So if we’re talking about fitness programs, what we’re looking for is a history of success, a track record, the longer the better. And then on top of that we’re looking for a consistency of success over that history.
The first qualifying factor is a history of success. The second thing is consistency because you can have a long history of success but also be inconsistent within that long history. So the second qualifying factor works in conjunction with the first, but is also independent from it. Something could have a short history, but have quite trailblazing, shooting star, high quality, consistency of success. And it may well be worth your time and worth your money to invest in something that is on the up, even if it’s in its infancy because it’s very clearly high quality and it’s very clearly a shooting star. You’ll want to grab that tiger by the tail and go with it.
But it is BETTER to not only have that consistent high quality, but to also have it over a long period of time. To take that a step further, if you want to subdivide it further and look for deeper layers of what makes something worthwhile, then you’re going to want to look for that long history of success, consistently, among many different demographics.
What am I talking about? Well, it’s easy for something to work well with untrained college males, let’s say. Let’s take probably one of the most responsive groups, young men, young athletic men who are neophyte when it comes to the training process. In other words they’re just on the cusp, ready to explode with newbie gains, no matter what type of training they do, no matter what type of diet they eat.
Getting consistent, even longterm success with a demographic as limited as untrained men between the age of 18 and 25 can easily skew the perspective on the success and the quality of the program itself. So what you’re looking for is as diverse as possible and as holistic as possible, a success rate among a really wide demographic: young, old, male, female, different countries, different ethnicities, different cultures, different diets, everything.
It needs to hold true as delivering world class results no matter what.