Post it ugly

One of the guys on my Tuesday call said something I haven't been able to shake, and it's a bit of an indictment of every one of us.

He's running a series right now where he's trying to lose 100 pounds and get to 100,000 followers at the same time. Same guy, same year, both goals. His reasoning is that the two skills work identically. You're bad at it, you keep doing it anyway, you get better.

Then he said this.

You've got somebody who came into the gym at 400 pounds and couldn't squat six inches. But they kept showing up even though they clearly looked like shit inside a gym. It's the same thing with posting. Post it ugly.

We tell people that every single day. All of us. That is the ENTIRE PITCH of a gym. Come in bad at this. Be bad at it in front of other people. Keep coming and you'll stop being bad.

Then somebody hands us a camera and suddenly we need better lighting, and a plan, and a less chaotic week, and to lose ten pounds first.

His follow up is the part that should get you off the hook:

You're not Caleb Ralston. You're not Alex Hormozi. People are aware of that. They aren't expecting high level content from you. They're expecting you to know what the hell you're talking about and to say it in a way that relates to them.

If you want somewhere concrete to start, he calls it yap content. No script, no setup. Turn the camera on and talk about fitness for ten or twenty minutes. Talk about what a member asked you this week. Talk about something you used to be wrong about. There's no point to it, you're just talking. Then drop the whole thing into any editing software and pull three to five reels out of it.

Ten minutes of talking to yourself, and most of a week of content is done.

The only thing I know for sure here is that I have been genuinely terrible at almost every skill this business has ever asked me to learn. Calendar blocking took me MONTHS of screwing it up before it felt normal. If I'd quit the first two times it went badly I'd still be running the entire gym out of my own head.

That's the trap with marketing especially. You post four times, nothing happens, you feel like a turd, you stop. And you stop right before the part where you quit feeling like a turd. The only way through it is more reps closer together, which is the exact advice we'd give a member who came three times and disappeared.

One more thing, and this one surprised me.

Another owner on that call started casually putting client wins up on his Instagram story while he walks his dog. Nothing produced, couple times a week. Now his members come find him in the gym to tell him about their wins, because they want to be the one that goes up next.

He wasn't trying to change how his members behave. He just started talking about them out loud, and they started handing him more to talk about.

Go make something bad this week.

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.