Real business savvy for real life seasons with Rachel Brenke of Fitlegally
Transcript
The Work IN is brought to you by Savage Grace Coaching and The Well Retreat
Ericka Thomas 0:00
Welcome back to the Work IN my guest today is Rachel Brenke, she is a multifaceted entrepreneur Lawyer and a Team USA triathlete. Aside from her extensive career Rachel is a military spouse and mother of five. As an entrepreneur, Rachel created Brenke brands, which includes Fitlegally the Law tog and Rachel Brenke. She's also the author of seven books hosted the Real biz podcast and founded a boutique niche law firm. Her belief that you can create a business that allows you to live the real life you dream of living is a lot has allowed her to travel the world with her family while creating a successful empire. Hey, Rachel, welcome. So thank you so much for being here.
Rachel Brenke 0:50
Of course. Thanks for having me. I always hold my breath when people do BIOS I'm like don't lead with lawyer because those shut off the podcasts that they hear that like that's the first thing so get in there.
Ericka Thomas 1:03
Oh, no. Oh, no. I love that about that. Because I think for so many beginning entrepreneurs, I know for myself, especially like the legal side of business really held me back from just diving in for so long. I was just so scared of it. And I think there's a lot of fear around that. I definitely want to I want to dive into that because I think that that is something that we can demystify today, hopefully. But before we get there, Rachel, tell us a little bit more about you maybe some things in your story that people don't normally get to hear and and then we'll get into the the other juicy stuff.
Rachel Brenke 1:47
Yeah, so actually, even before I was an attorney, I got onto entrepreneurship. About 17 years ago, I had just been diagnosed with cancer and I kind of always had this pool of that I didn't fit in the nine to five the cubicle farm type of thing and I was the kid the report card of Rachel talks too much she's bossy she's always the leader, like all these things that were kind of negatives during school have paid off and entrepreneurship. But when I when I was diagnosed with cancer, we had one baby at the time husband was in and out to Iraq and I just was thinking, you know, I want to be able to work flexibly as much as I can work for myself. Fulfill my own, you know, goes in my own pockets and not the you know, some faceless corporation and I did work corporate world for a while I struggled back and forth. As I was building different businesses. I had an online apparel store I did graphic design very horribly. But I did it for a while. But you know, as I grew, I built businesses, I sold them on trying to see like what I'm interested in. I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs kind of get really excited about multiple things. But within that I just always knew consistently that I really wanted to have quality of life, you know however you define that for you and for me, I mean, I had no idea I'd end up with five babies um, but do and love it and I love being able to be around for them. And that was for me. It was so interesting during pandemic it was kind of like seeing the fruits of my labor you know, when everything shut down and they went virtual it was like almost without a hiccup because I was so thankful with the journey and you know, you think about Rachel, you're thankful you started with cancer. Well, cancer prompted me into entrepreneurship. And it kind of forced me into the sink or swim that I had to make work because you know in between husband deployed and my cancer treatments and with my son, I had to learn to work flexibly. And so I am thankful for kind of that baptism by fire in the very beginning, not that I'm thankful I had cancer, right? But it was just interesting seeing the connection between the very beginning to now like 17 years later and really seeing the fruits of that you know, yeah, so that's my long winded you know, the whole journey. I do get into helping businesses. I still do that. I've got, like you mentioned the law firm. I've got different legal businesses. I think the most important thing to share here, for those that are listening and you're probably like overwhelmed by the bio, sometimes I get overwhelmed hearing my own bio. I'm like, why does this gal sleep? I didn't build it. All of it at one time overnight. Like this is a Senate your journey, where I have, for the most part, lean into my strengths. leaned into figuring out when I was burnout. I can think of some very key moments and learning from that to keep it progressively going towards that quality of life that I wanted to have and I do have now
Ericka Thomas 4:38
that is so important. I'm so glad you brought that up because I think you're exactly right people hear someone's bio who's very very successful and they want to be like that person and they think they have to do all of those things all at one time. And that is really not how life works. What would you tell people was most instructive for you about like how to find that first direction. I mean, you said a couple times that, you know, your main desire was that particular quality of life. Right. So how did you figure out what that exactly was for you? And was that something that you knew right away that that was very delineated that was very clear from the beginning.
Rachel Brenke 5:30
I'm glad you asked this because it's a really good place to start if you're someone who's listening and you're like, I just you know, I want to be a year Rachel and you're gonna like I want this like flexible quality of life lifestyle, but I don't know what my passion is or what I'm good at. And I've gone through an evolution of things so what I really have started out and this is an exercise that I have done just kind of did naturally from the beginning but now we do it very formulaic Lee in our business, I do it with myself with my family. With my team members. I also do this with my business consulting clients, we sit down and we're not even thinking about industry. We're not thinking about niche. We're not thinking about any of the business stuff. We want to start with the life stuff. And I know that sounds kind of a little intangible and woowoo but the reality is for me, there's there's I mean I would be passionate about owning a hotel or a restaurant, but it wouldn't serve the life stage that I'm in and the lifestyle that I want right now. Right? It would require me in person at least in the beginning. So I like to reverse engineer it starting with you know, you're going to define two things, real business real life. But we need to start with what does that real life look to you? And I think we've kind of put a little asterix on that is that that can vary dependent upon the life stage that you're in. And so when I was building my businesses, all my babies when they're always babies, right, my 17 year old who have to look up at the ground and he has to like bend down and kiss me on the forehead. He's still my baby but when they were baby babies, you know that building the businesses look different than and so kind of my real life definition then was different than it is now. So we we work with sonically with those definitions, but that would be the place to start is what do I envision it to be? And it may not fit where you're at, maybe you're working a corporate job and family is dependent upon that money, you know, but it's one of those you have to have a barometer or end game of where you would like to be and then you can build the business because it's so important. And I'll tell you what, if I love business, I love the snot out of business. I thrive and I'm passionate, but I want it to be a supporting actor to my life. And I think that was kind of one of the things that I gleaned from having cancer and other events that have happened in my life is that at the end of my life, and trust don't get me wrong, I am proud. I'm thankful. I absolutely love the businesses that I built, but I just when I was diagnosed with cancer, I wasn't scared oh my god, am I gonna let my clients down? I wasn't scared even honestly about dying. The major things that I cried about was not having enough time with my son and the idea of him calling someone else mom and because like he was one at the time. So that was in the forefront of my mind. And so you just kind of take that and sit back and I know this is one of those things and if you y'all have heard me talk anywhere else I'm very bucket like I'm very methodical. ABCD here's what we do. But before we can even start doing ABC and D you really have to think, where are we trying to drive this train to what is what are we really trying to accomplish personally, because there's no point in building a business because especially you know, and we were talking about this pre show, but it's especially when you get into burnout moments when you're stressed because it's gonna happen in entrepreneurship. If you don't have that vision on what the real life that you want to have to be you're not going to have a guiding star and you're not going to want to put through the time and to do the things needed to get to it.
Ericka Thomas 8:57
Right because it's so easy to just say, well, this is not what I signed up for. Right? This piece is not what I signed up for. And you talk a little bit about hustle culture maybe we can kind of direct this into that space because I'm curious about what you mean by hustle culture. First, because I think we get a lot of messaging like if you want to have a successful business in anything, doesn't matter what it is, you've got a hustle, hustle, hustle, and you do it. But how do you do that if your intention is to have some sort of freedom in your life from being you know, tied to your business?
Rachel Brenke 9:53
I think it's a wonderful question, especially for fitness businesses, because we probably all have this whole type A athlete type of approach. So you get excited you sign up for a race or, or some sort of challenge and you're like nose to the grindstone, super excited to think about when the persevere comes along. Everyone's like new year new me new resolutions, and I feel like professionals, we probably take this a little bit to the extreme. So I'm glad to ask these questions. I feel like I have to rein myself in on this too. But yeah, we hear all this messaging and what's interesting giving some context to my timeline. When I first started out in business, there wasn't this freemium information. Podcasting really wasn't a thing. Blogging was really personal blogging, right. We didn't have these onslaught of business resources that we could dive into. Whereas now I feel like we're on the other side of things and it's almost perpetuated this to your question of hustle culture. I mean, we see on Pinterest and Instagram, all these places you got to do this you got to do that and, and I feel like sometimes I might add to the noise. I try to check myself. I think that you can you have to work hard in business, you've got to do the things you need to get done. So for me, I'm very formulaic in my day I record on certain days, I do certain tasks on certain days I would do like sprint work, we do batch work, but that is hustle in being smarter. So the whole smarter, not harder type of thing. Business is not going to be successful from brute force strength. And I feel like the hustle culture in the way that it's no universally spoken on the interwebs right now, is that you've got to work the 40 hour days. Yes. 40 hour days, there's no such thing, right. We're not to go to all these extremes. But all that does is it leads to burnout. And it especially leads to discouragement in those that are in the beginning stages of your business, those that may be on the cusp of a breakthrough in their business, but they can't see it because they've committed to quote unquote hustling and this brute force strength into the wrong area. So for me, this is why I don't really identify as like a business coach. It's more of like a strategist when I work with businesses because I very strategically going back to what we said a couple minutes ago, I want to make sure that our real business is supporting actor to our real life. So all decisions in business. Yes, we're going to work hard and we're going to commit but our nose to the grindstone, but we're not going to do it at the expense of our life. We're not going to do it at the expense of being efficient and strategic. Those are the cornerstones and how we make all of our decisions. I just for me, and I know I'm probably getting a little bit of a soapbox here we've seen we're recording this was at January 2022. And so we're almost two years into pandemic. And one of the Silver Linings that I've seen and I've welcomed with open arms is so many individuals especially in the fitness professional field, you know, go into online starting to train online, do courses do programs. Or coaching is a huge thing that we're seeing. And when I say coaching, I'm referring to business coaching. The downfall to that is that we have so much noise we have so many people that are regurgitating the wrong definition of hustle culture and not the smart strategic definition and it's almost perpetuating the cycle and leading newer businesses astray. And like even sitting here I can feel like my pulse quickening and going up because I tried that I I can think of very distinct moments in my business journey over the last 17 years anything of at least about four or five, that what was the precursor to the burnout, it was subscribing this hustle culture, this idea of brute force strength making success happen and it doesn't work that way.
Ericka Thomas 13:40
So what would you what advice can you give to new entrepreneurs or maybe people feel like they've gotten sucked into that hustle culture a little bit? How do they how do you figure out what is the strategic action to take the efficient strategic, focused work that needs to be done and what is the fluff?
Rachel Brenke 14:09
Okay, so before answering that, I do want to kind of clarify something I just said it's not just that this information is being put out onto the internet. There's also and I was in this place, the very beginning entrepreneurship. Many people also got into business out of necessity, financial need, right? And so I understand, especially as someone who's naturally always been an anxious individual, and even as an adult, I'm really learning to manage it and Gad is one of those double edged swords, but having fear of, you know, financial resources needed the fear of meeting it to become successful can be really good as long as it doesn't paralyze you, as long as it doesn't push you into this complete hustle culture. Now, I'll tell you what, I'm glad you asked me this question because I think it's important especially when individuals like myself, who have built businesses, successful businesses, I've had failures too. But when we come on these sorts of platforms, it's really easy kind of sit in this ivory tower of do when I say ABC, you can be just like me, and the reality is, I still have to force myself F because again, what we said earlier, it's stages of life. Our life changes, we're in different seasons. And so I always have to try to keep myself in check. And I do it a couple of ways. So to answer your question, right. I always want to make sure that anytime that I'm going to do something in my business, so if I'm going to commit to coming onto a podcast, like this, or if I'm going to travel to speak or take on a certain client or put out let's use the example of creating content for social media, you know, one of the most classic ways to really expand your reach is repurposing content. So I kind of take my three to one rule of for everyone action I take, I need to have like three benefits. It's kind of a it's kind of a play on the pros cons list, except I need to see a real physical return from that one action. So for example, when I record my podcast, we do it we do it live on Instagram, and so I'm hitting it live. Then we're ripping the audio for Apple and Spotify. Then it's also going on YouTube right there shows you three to four examples and that that's a very like basic example, but you can apply that to anything in your business. So for example, but coming on here, one of the things that we run through is to make sure what are the benefits? Well, here I had my brand fit legally, we are working with fitness professionals who need to have their legal stuff. I also know that I wanted to get in front of other audiences. The other return is that this also gives us something to put on our social media and it's an authority builder. So that's three very specific returns out of this one action recording this podcast. And you know, it's so funny, and I talk about this a lot. And on my podcast and on my social. Getting to success isn't a complex action. It's not like this huge Quantum Leap trajectory built of all these complex actions is actually very consistent simplistic acts. So it's this consistently applying the three to one role consistently making sure that you are sticking within your you know, checking your key performance indicators and leaning into the things that are going to give you a return like if I put something on social and it doesn't resonate. I'm probably not going to repost it again because it didn't resonate before is kind of a waste of time, and real inner internet real estate for me. So that's one of the big key things. The other side of it is kind of in this vein we're talking about I alluded to, you know going into burnout. I notice it when there's some common themes that when I'm starting to feel burnout, I either haven't stopped to look around and adjusted myself based on the season of life I'm in for example, last year damn pandemic, I had to shift all of my daytime recording and podcast up to the evening so that I could do virtual learning what kids during the day when I was trying to do him at the same time, it was leading distress simplistic example but it's one the other two is in like normal times, quote unquote, whatever that whatever that even means. At this point in like this century, I feel like we've been doing this forever. It's just checking internally and making sure that I am not acting from an anxious place a fear based place or subscribing kind of like we were just talking about the hustle culture, making sure that the actions I'm taking fit not three to one rule, but they're actually going to grow the business at least 1% Everyday compounding so for me, being the leader, I need to be looking for something that is going to increase growth of audience and or increase revenue and so that has to be a key action that I take daily. And the reason I share this and again it's simplistic is when I start to get anxious about business maybe I've been reviewing KPIs, the key performance indicators. And finances are the big one, right? Because I have to help financially support my family as well as all the team members, all the employees that depend upon me for their salaries. If I start seeing like a little dip in the revenue, I can start creeping into that anxious fear base place, and I might start being irrational and not a strategic in my decisions. And that's when I find myself tipping over into hustle culture, which then also leads into burnout and it's not effective for anyone so bringing it back around to very defining real business real life, the three to one rule and making sure you keep a pulse. And so this is where the very methodical approach of I try it because it's so easy for us as entrepreneurs to put our nose to the grindstone and never sit up and look around and see what's going on. And I mean that physically and emotionally and all of that. So really, if you're someone that gets so committed and so into the business, schedule yourself, sound simplistic schedule yourself time to sit and just look up and look around and see our do you need to reapply the three to one do you need to adjust your definitions? Not is been the most? Those have been the consistent things that have always allowed me to have a longer stretch of time between burnout to burnout, but also when I start feeling burnout, those are kind of the three keys that get me back on track.
Ericka Thomas 20:24
Rachel you said so much there. No, no, no, no, it's okay. It's okay. I was trying to like keep the little running log of that so we could we could dig a little deeper. But I I love the three to one. I love that. It's it's a really, really simple thing. I think people could apply it immediately. Right? And this is something this batching content reusing content if you are an online entrepreneur, especially in the fitness industry, you can spend hours and hours and hours creating content for social media and all of these things. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. And I think that that is an important thing to understand that your time is really valuable. And so we need to be careful about that otherwise we can just spin around in social media and it's not actually growing our business in a real way. Right. So I think all of that is so so important. But another key point that you made Rachel that I'd like to highlight and maybe we can talk a little more about that is this idea of paying attention to what season of life you're in and then following that up with you know, being okay with making some sort of pivot or change when it becomes apparent that that needs to happen because if you are operating either from a place of fear or anxiety or you're in a place where you are, you know, emotionally or physically burned out, where you're not able to give your best or bring your best to the table then something needs to change something you can't just keep doing the same thing that you've been doing and hoping something different will happen. That's the definition of insanity. Right? So so the idea of paying attention to that. Maybe that that may be something you that you it's okay for you to change what you're doing. It's okay to make a different choice. And maybe pivot your business I know so many people did that over the last two years. Right? We we were forced to do it. Especially in the fitness industry, right? All of a sudden, all the gyms are closed and you still need a paycheck. It was absolutely necessary, but how are you going to do that and some people did it more effectively than others more quickly than others. So can we talk a little bit more about this idea of of pivoting? When is it time to change right? When is it when is this business over and is it okay to start something completely new and different? Let's just let's just dive into that.
Rachel Brenke 23:24
Yeah, it's funny is I initially when you're first outlining the three, I was like, Okay, these are very three distinct points. And then the more that you're talking, I'm like, no, they're actually really all intertwined. Because if you I mean, we can look at let's take real quickly pandemic, kind of off the table and many people were forced you didn't have a choice. So that's almost easier sometimes in a sense right it when you're getting like with me in the very beginning, I couldn't go work. I had the you know, out in the real world when unquote, I was having treatments and surgeries and son and it costs was gonna cost more for daycare than it was for me to go. Go out and work a regular job at the time. And so I learned a lot out of that. And I feel not to say that everyone that was forced hearing pandemic has figured it out, but I kind of want to first speak to all of those that might be kind of make a change due to burnout. Because I can connect that very simply back to something you said a second ago about social media and you get you really do the athlete pun here, you get on this treadmill, and you almost lie to yourself, in a sense, and especially if you're someone that has anxiety or something in your history, and if that's multifaceted, we could be here all day talking about the psychology of it, but it's really easy when you're faced with something that you know is not working and it's uncomfortable. We almost justify it with we just don't know how Instagram works for oh, we just need to get a quick hack or very clearly what came up when you were talking when I see all the time with burnout is oh, all just, you know social media. I got to do a one real a week. I'll just do it every Monday. Okay on paper we say it out loud. It sounds really good. Okay, I will just it only takes me two minutes to create a real it's two minutes every Monday. Actually it's more than that. It's creating coming up what you're going to talk about scheduling the time to do it, prepping how you're going to look on camera sending up the light setting up the thing, getting a real job, editing it, posting it during the capture doing the hash tag with all these things. It's an hour later than that's an hour out of that day that you didn't get to do other activities. So to your point. i If you are someone who prefer now I want you to evaluate one or two things or you in a cycle like I just described where you're chasing this content that treadmill or replace it with something else in business, and I always really encourage my clients to sit and do like a 30 minute solo strategy session a week. And if you don't know what you're going to strategize, think about what your biggest emotion and pain points are many people and is trying to keep up with social media and content. So like what would be our answer here, it'd be batch content creation. I do this all the time. All lay up 12 shirts on my bed and all go through and record 12 or 24 Back to back and just change on my shirt pull my hair up, you know, just change it up. So so look like I created them all on one day. Now the people really even care. Get it done. But the reason why I think that is important is that especially if you're working a full time job elsewhere, and you don't have a lot of time or you just feel like you're always chasing the hours. Look at how you can be more effective with your time such as with bash. But I say all that to say many times people will get to a burnout place. And they don't know if it's a full on burnout that they need to pivot to something new. Or if it's just a burnout based on this season that you can very quickly change by doing batch processing or very quickly instituting new process or outsource or change something that's a pain point. I just don't want those that are in a place of feeling like they have to pivot. Just pivot or do nothing. I want you to identify why you're feeling that way. And what is leading to that. And oftentimes the majority of people again to entrepreneurship, are in relative and this is colloquially I don't have the statistics on this, but just based on the clients that I've worked with the majority when they get to that feeling of burnout that they want to quit or pivot. It's not actually that they want to quit or pivot. They just are so drowned in burnout through actions that they haven't fixed or strategize or worked with. Now there is a small subset that gets an entrepreneurship, who just finally realizes they don't want to run their own business.
That's okay too. And I think a lot of times they feel like they have to stick it out, either financially required for their family or self or because they're afraid of failing. And then the last subset, which I think is really what you're referring to, are those that just have this feeling of wanting to make a pivot by choice, right. And I think what's important is to make sure that you're making that pivot. And we can define pivot very broadly or very narrowly, like Are you fully throwing away you know, going from yoga to all of a sudden teaching running, I mean, you know, or throwing away fitness and all of a sudden going into Macrame beading some other art thing right? What does your pivot look like? But figure out honestly, what, what is the reason for doing that? Then? Again, I don't want to get into psychology, I guess, of all of it. But I see, for the most part, the majority of entrepreneurs, they start to get bored with their business. Either they're frustrated with it because it's not doing what they want to do. Which honestly, most of the time it's them. We don't go back to like, are you on a content treadmill, where your pain points and all of that or they're bored and I think what's really important understand is, if you're in a place where your business is going well, and you just feel like you're doing the same mundane things. Guess what your business is not here to entertain you. Right? Sure. We have fun and get entertainment and we get enjoyment out of it. But it's not here to entertain. That's what having a hobby is for. So identify what is the point? What is the catalyst I guess for your desire to pivot?
Ericka Thomas 30:00
Yeah, and that would go back to you know, your big why of what it is that you started your business for in the first place. Right? That lifestyle desire that you want to have eventually, right? I mean, you can get that in lots of different ways. It doesn't have to be a particular business. You can find it in many, many, many different ways we don't we're not stuck with one thing. So I think it's good, exactly what you said to just reassess every once in a while, like reassess Is this where I really want to be and what I really want to be doing, and you're exactly right. You've got to figure out why. Why is this not working? Why does this feel like this to me? I know for myself, I was an independent contractor for many years, most of my time in the fitness industry was spent as an independent contractor, and the challenge there was being able to work enough hours to make enough money that would support what I needed it to support and not drive my body into the ground. And that is a different type of burnout. That is something that's very, very common for instructors in the fitness industry. Because we trade dollars for hours and so it's really important that you find a way to scale it that will not hurt your, that will not hurt your body. You know, over time, because we just can't physically do that. You mentioned this earlier about the 40 hour work day. But in the fitness industry, there's no such thing like we talked about full time in the fitness industry. If you think of a full time week as 40 hours, you can't teach 40 hours of classes every week. It's just it's not physically possible. So full time for a fitness professional in the industry who's worked with that's their main source of income. It's not 40 hours of content of contact with people, you know, so so there's there's ways to be smart about that. Right? This is what we're talking about to work smart. Not hard. Like we don't have to physically be teaching that particular class or that you know that format. Every time you can still you can still do something else that makes you know three or four times the amount of money in that same amount of time. There's, there's scaling things, there's workshops, there's, you know, all kinds of different creative ways to do that. And sometimes it takes getting out of your own head and getting out of the idea that this is the way it's done. Right. This is the only way to be a fitness professional. And there's when there's so many more options out there.
Rachel Brenke 33:24
I'm glad you brought this up because that was some that was kind of swirling in my mind while I was talking a little bit ago, is that we need to have multiple, you always hear about multiple revenue streams and most people will think about that as far as like seven distinct type businesses, right? You don't even have to have that but you can have different offerings in your business. However, one thing that I've seen consistently over the years and it's not just specific to the fitness industry, I see this with many entrepreneurs and I raised my hand I was one of those very beginning. It was I need to do all the things for all the people all the time and that's how everyone will come to me. And it's when you really narrow down and get very specific so extremely specific and who you're serving. What you're serving and getting really good at that one specific offering. Then just like what you were talking about, you can start scaling. Yes. It's not physically possible for you to do 40 personal training. I mean, maybe it is but you're gonna burn yourself out physically, emotionally and all that very quickly. But even if you can't figure out how to do that many personal trainers in a week you're still have all the other hours of everything else you need to do. So yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up because I think it's important especially if you are either burnout in a feel like you're not attract you're spread so thin you're doing all these different offerings skill back getting one very, very specific offering that you do, do it very well and then find a way to scale that is it having people come in to help you teach it, you know, is it Are you good? Can you do it in a format that provides like a virtual format those sort of things that that I think is really incredibly important, especially if you are a services business, right, especially in fitness, whether you're running a brick and mortar gym or you're coming to someone's house to do personal training, your time is limited your physical limitations are are what they are. And I think even more so for this industry. It's important that we figure out ways just like you said, how to scale it and slowly start adding on different offerings that I feel like when people try to offer too much at one time, that's when they risk the burnout, and they're not as effective and you're not able to figure out how to leverage and scale one when you're trying to do five or 10 or whatever it is whatever type of business it is that you're doing right now.
Ericka Thomas 35:49
And and I think also it doesn't really give you the space maybe that is needed to really learn your craft, you know, to really really be present in that and figure out what works best for for you in that space.
Rachel Brenke 36:07
Yeah, I've been wanting to do an episode. I also see businesses that penetrate the market with one very specific thing and then they expand once they dominate. And I feel like that is the way especially especially now when we're recording this and now there was this huge rush for fitness online. So you are someone's like all I'm doing online offerings as a fitness business you really have to get So Uber specific creative on how to set yourself apart with that, or else you're going to not meet your goals, you're going to get burnout and you're going to start questioning should I pivot that way here that example that we just gave is kind of a kind of pivot that I want people to run through in their mind first okay, how can I still you know, how can I narrow my offering narrow who I'm talking to make myself the go to for, you know, a versus trying to do for ABCD and E and then do it really, really well? You know, and then you can expand back out so to simplify down to scale up? Mm
Ericka Thomas 37:08
hmm. Yeah, that's great. Advice. And it should, it should really feel freeing to some of our listeners about that, right? Because it can be really hard sometimes if you've got multiple, ideal clients maybe, or maybe you've been a generalist for so long. Because sometimes when you niche down, you're gonna lose some people. But that's okay. Because you're going to get more of the bright person, the person that's right for you. So, yeah, so let's let's, let's talk a little bit more. Let's go back and talk a little bit more about that. That some of that fear that can stand in the way and I mentioned this right out of the gate. I think for a lot of fitness professionals, one of the things that maybe stands in the way is not having a really good idea of business in general. I mean, we're very good especially for fitness. fitness professionals are really good at what they do, but they aren't necessarily coming from a business background, or definitely not a legal background. And they're super creative people. But it can be very daunting when you are just a simple thing like setting up your own website and then all of a sudden you have to have all these legal documents that are there somewhere in the background.
Rachel Brenke 38:42
Lawyers are no fun! so I get it, no one wants to deal with that anyway, right. It's very well, it's
Ericka Thomas 38:48
scary because nobody Well, there's always a fear of failure, but nobody wants to, you know, make a mistake and get their hand slapped like we are nobody likes that. Right? And when it when you're talking about legal forms, and I mean, we're just unfortunately very litigious society and you want everything to be safe. And I don't know about you, but I'm one of those people that likes to be super prepared and cross all the t's and dot all the I's and but if you don't know what you don't know, then, you know, where do we start with that for for legal protection for ourselves, for our business, so that we can just, I mean, like, what can you tell people to to you know, lift some of that mystery?
Rachel Brenke 39:37
Yeah, the shameless plug would be Fitlegally.com , but of course, that's like somebody knew there was missing this resource. No, but I think before we get into that, what I really want to outline to say is, and again, at the very beginning of the episode, I was like, don't lead with lawyer because the lawyer didn't come first. The business owner, the entrepreneur, the mom, the spouse, the person wants to live their life comes first. And so I I'm a little different than most attorneys if you find me on the interwebs, you'll definitely see that I'm just different. And because I work with entrepreneurs, and my advice is obviously founded in legal but I'm not telling it to you. What I'm going to I'm what I'm going to outline here. Second is not simply because I'm an attorney, it's actually more so because I am a business owner who knows what it's like to carry the 500 hats and juggle the 15 million balls and that legal is the last thing anyone wants to deal with. And so you hit it on the head with like, it's really all about preventive because it's going to cost you more time, money and energy to have to clean up an issue when it happens not if it's going to be when whether it's a miscommunication with client or if they feel like they didn't get what they were paying for or someone gets hurt. I mean, insert any sort of other horror story. You've heard them you probably have had them, but it's going to cost you more time, money and energy and as fun as I can be. Wouldn't you rather be hanging out with your athletes and your clients and growing your business as opposed to talking to me on the phone to clean up something and paying me for it? Yes, because the reality is, we don't want the lawyers to be the ones to win at the end of the day. And when there's a problem. That's really the only people that win, because when you have a problem, you're going to be spending time, money and energy that you could be putting into your business on a lawyer and that's no fun. They're no fun. Most lawyers are not fun. So I said I would love all the love all alive. Although most are pretty boring. But I implore you all I say all that to say, then I have been harping on this because I think it's so incredibly important that it has to be done if you make it in your mind and non negotiable because you absolutely don't want to be in the pain of any sort of issue later work on it now and here's the kind of a little quick and dirty checklist. You know, we want to look at it from a liability perspective, especially working in the fitness industry. I mean, depending on who you're working with, I you know, you could have clients that are that have some sort of late I don't want to give away my clients I know once again you're gonna be working with moms like me who wanted to lose weight after baby you could be working with people who are a bodybuilder see all the way up through working with elderly to keep their range of motion like you are working with all sorts of sensitive type of clients. And so we want to make sure that we are setting ourselves up so limited liability protection, the big three things and by the way, this is US based I am an attorney I'm not your attorney unless you want me to be disclaimer, fine print, all that sort of stuff right here. But you want to look at having like an LLC or a corporation, having your insurance in place and also using proper contract. So like if you are doing personal training, a personal training services contract, if you're offering online videos or courses, you know the terms of enrollment for that and we're because we're wanting to use these three pieces the legal entity that insurance and our contracts kind of like hurdles between us and our client and any potential liability. And we're wanting we want them to all work because they all work in different ways. We want to have all three, but most people when they first start out and I get it that again I started my businesses long before I was an attorney. When you're sitting down, you're looking at your money, and you're going oh I hardly have two nickels to rub together. I don't have much to put back into my business. It's easy to be drawn to the sexy call the marketing siren because the idea is if you have marketing you have clients, you have money coming in the door and I love marketing. I'm not known for marketing, I freaking love the heck out of marketing. But the reality is if I market and get all these clients and then I get sued because I didn't have the right things in place, all that marketing is a wash at that point. So you know again the quick checklist legal entity insurance and contracts have all that in place. And I think the key thing that I will and I see this all the time, all the time is people will inquire to our law firm and they'll say well how much is it for this contract and by the way, you know we have these for like instant download on Fit legally and all of that and like cost effective but if you're gonna go to an attorney, you're probably looking at 800 A couple $1,000 for to get all the contracts and the terms in place that you need. That sounds like a lot and again, wait starting out. That can be a lot of money. However, the other side of it is I've had clients who come they're like I don't want to spend the 800 bucks, they go on their merry way. They write their own thing. Then they're back in my inbox to the firm saying, well, now I'm being sued by a client even though I'm in the right they still have to show up to court. They have to pay the attorneys again, we don't want the attorneys are the only ones who when they pay the attorneys $10,000 to defend them. They win. And it's not like you see on TV, whoever wins gets third court fees and their attorneys fees paid for unless it's in the contract properly, or some sort or other statutory law that helps but typically not so they didn't pay the 800 then they had to pay 10,000 to fight it then what do they have to do in the end pivot 800 To fix the contract anyways, going forward. So I share that that's a very classic example that I see. And you can avoid issues and for me, again, as an attorney, we want these three key pieces but very specifically on the contracts. It's not even just legal protection. Let's say that I'm a personal trainer, it's very specifically outlining expectations. What about cancellations reschedules dispute resolution? What they're going to get what you know how much they're supposed to pay me as the trainer, how many sessions am I going to give them it's making sure that we're all administratively on the same page with a backbone of legal protections. So those that's the quick and dirty and we could go into sort of like brand protection, which is more marketing type stuff, but from a liability perspective. Those are the three big key ones that I want you guys to make sure you have in place.
Ericka Thomas 46:08
Yeah, that's huge. And it does seem like a lot of money in the beginning. But once you have that setup, and you've got that relationship with your whoever you're using for, for your lawyer, it's much easier it's it's like lifting a layer of stress off of you. It's it's supposed to help you and I'm a big believer in paying for things that you don't know how to do. So if you don't if you're not a lawyer, and you don't know how to do contracts, then pay somebody to do that. Take that off your plate. And then it's one less thing for you to have to worry about. You can fall back on that for your business. And business can be stressful in many other ways, but it doesn't have to be stressful there. If you don't want it to be
Rachel Brenke 47:06
that's a mark of a savvy and developed business owner when you can look at something and go this is not my strength. And I'm here's my plan to make it happen whether, you know maybe not illegal, but if it's like I just can't figure out social media will committing and learning it or outsourcing it right, making you unable to say I come in above my head on this. And that is so incredibly important, especially because we're doers. That's why we're in entrepreneurship. We think we can do it all. And one of the key ways to scale is to simplicity against the things that you're good at and either improve the things that you're not or outsource it and like I know enough on taxes too dangerous, but I love having and actually when we were sitting here I think my CPA tried to call. I love having that security of knowing not only is it probably being taken care of better than I could do. Here's another key thing I probably shouldn't share this but if there was a problem, you have recourse. So let's say you sit down to wrote your own contract and it hurt you. You don't have any recourse against yourself. You're all on the hook. But if you go and get a CPA to do your taxes, and then you get audited when it's bad, or you know, you go to an attorney, it's a really crappy contract that they write for you. You have no recourse for any damages that came out of that. You don't have that for yourself.
Ericka Thomas 48:30
Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And you made a good point there. It's either time or money. Right? There's a lot of things when you're starting up a business when you don't if you're bootstrapping especially you know it's so tempting to just figure it out into it yourself. And, and I know for me when I first decided to actually become a real business grownup, big girl business and get my LLC like I was all about doing everything myself because a I didn't have any money and I had all kinds of time. So the time, right, it's time or money and then you get to the point where you're like, Well, I don't have the time anymore. So I better come up with the money because it still has to get done. And it is your business and I don't know I think about my business, kind of like a little baby, you know, a little baby and sometimes you need to take the baby to the doctor to the professional. Make sure it's healthy.
Rachel Brenke 49:28
So this way I mean lawyers have their own lawyers I represent a lot of attorneys I write a lot of law firms contracts because they're not contracts attorneys, and doctors have doctors, many of you who you're training someone you probably have a personal trainer for yourself to or a coach or something and so we we all eat you can humble yourself to recognize that you don't know all the things that can't do all the things. That's another key piece again, simplistic advice, but that is a key piece of getting out of your way and frankly, it helps to offload a lot right burnout. You're wanting to try to avoid getting to that place or get feeling like you're forced dependent or giving up it's offloading a lot of the stuff if you can but again, I've been there I didn't have the money to pay for it and so it's trying to find a stop gap which is why fit legally exist you know, or it's just really trying to prioritize the things that you can do in order to invest in the right areas of business and I get it I said it jokingly earlier you know, the sexy siren of the marketing mavens, but it's true like marketing so much more fun than legal stuff. But there's no sense in doing one if you're not prepared. For one the clients come in the door.
Ericka Thomas 50:45
Right? Absolutely. I love that. And I think that is a perfect, perfect cap to this conversation because we want to be prepared for when the clients come in the door. Absolutely. So Rachel, thank you so much for joining us today. I know that you're going to have a whole bunch of people checking out fit legally. I will be one of them checking that out right after this conversation. It's awesome. And because this podcast is called the work in and I always asked my my guests to share something that they are doing for themselves for their own work in instead of a work out something that helps to keep them balanced and brings joy into their business and their life. Do you have anything like that that you could share with us today?
Rachel Brenke 51:42
Yeah every day, most most days I schedule a time on the calendar for me to go and workout. don't have my phone. Almost I listen to podcasts or something. It's just for me. It's for my physical, mental and emotional well being and it's a non negotiable meeting on my schedule. Except for kids, kids kids can impact and let it slip this something happens but business wise Nope. All that comes after that is so important to me as a CEO as a leader. And as a partner.
Ericka Thomas 52:12
That's awesome. Awesome. Thank you, Rachel, so much for being with us today.
Rachel Brenke 52:17
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
Ericka Thomas 52:19
Take care. Thanks for joining me today on the work in and if you're looking for a way to expand your professional credibility within your scope of practice, I'd like to invite you to join me in person at the wealth. This is a one day retreat happening on March 26 2022. In the Dayton Ohio area. The well is focused on navigating the stress curve for better results for yourself and the people in your lives. We are going to be learning how to shake off stress and tension physically, mentally and emotionally and how to translate a lot of stress language to give it what it needs. This is going to be a really intimate group. Very, very fun. And if you're in the area, I would love to see you there. So if you're interested in more information, go to savage Grace coaching.com. And if you have more questions, head over to savage Grace coaching comm forward slash inquiry and book a free 30 minute consultation. I would love to check in with you and see if this is something that could serve you. Thanks again for joining me and I will see you all next time on the work in take care
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