The first step to multiple income streams for fitness professionals.

I was a 20 year old kid when the patent attorney said to me, ‘Ahhh, so you’re one of those ‘fitnesspreneurs’ are you?

I was sitting across his mahogany desk from him, in an expensive-feeling leather chair.

And I was WAY out of my comfort zone. Big time imposter syndrome.

I was there to finalise the patent on an exercise device I’d developed.

The whole process was super expensive – especially for a recently graduated uni student.

This was the latest in a long chain of harebrained schemes in my obsession with generating ‘multiple income streams’.

Spoiler alert… this project was NOT a financial success. Just like many ideas before it, and many (many) more ideas since.

But just because it wasn’t a FINANCIAL success, doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful.

Because, (cliche warning) it was a great lesson. Future successes were built off the back of that ‘failure’.

And failures are ridiculously important, because failures teach you what DOESN’T work.

Ideas are infinite. The possible pathways you can take are infinite. And that’s overwhelming. The ‘paradox of choice’ means you don’t know what to do, because you don’t know what will work.

So you need to narrow your surplus of ideas down – and quickly. And the best way to do that is to cancel out all the bad ideas. And the way you do that is by trying them, and failing.

Sample widely. Implement lots of different ideas see what works, see what doesn’t.

In my mind I’ve always pictured this like throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall, then (at the end of the day/week/month/year), seeing what sticks. The ideas that stick are the ones to capitalise on. To flesh out. To build.

And the ones that don’t stick – they’re useful too – because they tell you which ideas WON’T work. They allow you to choose where to focus your time, effort, energy, resources.

To summarise: Success in any field comes down to exploration and exploitation. Explore and sample widely until you find an area you can exploit.

But surely all this sampling takes time right?

Not if you do it right.

This is where the concept of a MINIMAL VIABLE PRODUCT comes into effect.

And this is where we explore the first step Fitness Professionals should take to generate multiple income streams.

I’m assuming here that ‘ideas’ are not a problem for you. You have plenty of ideas. Usually, the problem is not the idea, but the execution. The ability to TEST that idea.

Here’s how we do that. Here’s how we sample widely to see what sticks.

You need a big list of ideas (which you should be constantly updating).

Look down the list and find the idea that excites you the most. Ask yourself if it solves someone’s problem. If the answer is yes, we can continue.

You’re now going to go about building a ‘minimal viable product’.

An MVP is the most absolute basic and underdeveloped project you can create. On face value, it looks great, but there’s no substance behind it. No systems, no refinement. No real ‘product’. It’s just an idea, all dressed up to look like a business.

‘Perfectionists’ need not apply!

Two quotes from Reid Hoffman (the founder of LinkedIn) spring to mind…

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

and

“An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”

Let me give you an example of one of my own MVPs.

I always have at least one ‘idea that will probably fail’ on the go. I’d say maybe 80-90% of them DO fail, just like this one…

I saw a need for Fitness Professionals to combine their own training with their own personal and professional development. I had the idea to create a version of our online programming (one of our ideas in the past that has worked) specifically for Fitness Professionals. It would provide them with multiple exercise sessions each week for THEM to complete, along with detailed education around the science and reasoning behind each training session.

My hypothesis was that this would allow them to prioritise their own training, while learning too.

I needed to test the idea. So, in the space of about six hours (I have time allocated in my calendar each week for ‘probably gonna fail’ projects like this), I built a website and a Facebook group (which I grew to a couple of hundred people from my Fitness Professionals network). I wrote the first six sessions (two weeks worth) and filmed an educational video for each session. I scheduled all the sessions, educational videos, and movement demo videos to post to the Facebook group for the next two weeks as a free trial.

Like I said, about six hours work.

At the end of the two weeks, I private messaged everyone in the Facebook group to get their feedback and see if they would like to continue at $25 / week.

The reception was lukewarm. There was interest, but not enough to justify my time. So I canned the project. It WAS a big success – because I’d identified something that wouldn’t work. An idea I could cross off my list. An opportunity cost I could remove on my way to finding an idea the market liked.

There have been MANY of these failed MVPs. And there have been a very small few that have gone on to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And the more failures you have, the more you start to be able to recognise the patterns that allow you to better ‘pre- qualify’ the ideas before you devote any time to them at all.

Now obviously, not all (let’s be honest, none) of the ideas you choose to pursue will be an overnight success. And you don’t automatically bin a project if it’s not an immediate financial win. There is a HUGE amount of grit and persistence and perseverance and ‘grind’ needed to create a success. But this process allows you to identify WHICH of your many ideas are the ones worth going ‘all in on’. It’s the first step, not the last.

So now it’s your turn. Start with the ideas. Then, build your MVP. Release it into the world. Does the world think the idea has potential? Go all in! Is the world not impressed? Move onto your next idea and repeat.

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