Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - How to Scale Your Empire Into Multiple Locations - 026

Episode Date: December 20, 2017

Craig Ballantyne and Bedros Keuilian have met countless entrepreneurs who open one successful business location, and want to go even bigger. But there’s one hurdle they’re forgetting to jump - just because you have one location running smoothly, does that make your business a scalable idea to survive anywhere? In this episode, Craig and Bedros will teach you the steps to opening multiple locations that have the legs and systems in place to thrive in various regions. Here’s what you’ll discover: 1:18 - How to prove your concept and find your unique selling point to expand your locations. 4:55 - Why you need to replace yourself and hire a talented team who can follow your systems. 7:03 - Why Curves failed and Fit Body Boot Camp is succeeding. Hint: proven results and culture matters! 9:32 - The three things you need in order to scale your business to its highest potential. 15:30 - Why patience is key and ego is your downfall.

Was it the owner himself or herself really making this thing successful or does this thing actually have legs? Got it. Is it going to work in a different city, different demographic, different community, different financial area, right? And so step number one is you want to prove the concept. Hey, friend, are you ready to go on a deep dive into what it takes to scale an empire from a single golden location? Well, good news. I have the man, the myth, the legend that is going to show you how to do that, Baderos Kulian. Yes, Baderos.

Welcome to another episode of the Empire Podcast. I'm Craig Valentine, and you are Bedros Kulian. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So listen, man, you have scaled FitBody Boot Camp into hundreds of locations around the world. It all started with one golden nugget, one golden idea.

You had multiple gyms back in the day. So why don't we just talk through this about, all right, you've got one successful location. People out there have one successful location, whether it is a tailor shop, or whether it's a restaurant, or whether it's a gym, and they want to go bigger. Sure.

So what's the first step? Yeah, you know, the very first step is to prove the concept. Anytime you want to scale, you want to prove the concept. So just because you have one location, that just pretty much means that it's dependent upon you. And we both know that when you're the entrepreneur, you've got the passion, you've got the zest, you've got the work ethic. You can make anything work just by simple, sheer willpower. The question is, can you scale it to a second and third location?

And when we're talking to scale, we're talking mass levels here, right? We're talking about like 600 locations like we have with Fit Body Boot Camp. There's a great ice cream store here in Chino Hills was their first one. They opened one in Cerritos now, and I think they've got a third one opening up. Here's their model. So it's a great topic right here. So Afters is an ice cream shop. But first of all, when you're going to scale anything, you have to go, what's unique about me?

Right? What's unique about me? Well, Afters takes a donut, a beautiful, glazed, yummy dough. donut, slices it almost all the way in half, right, puts a scoop about your favorite ice cream in there and then hands it to you. So you're eating a donut ice cream sandwich. And tell me that's not emotional. That's amazing. Yeah. And so they simplified the model where it's just donut, but it's always a glazed donut, but your choice of many different ice creams. So that immediately made them different than creamistry. It made them different than Coldstone creamery, different than

Baskin Robbins. Now, one location, great Chino Hills, a fluent area. They're from the area. It worked. But before they can even scale to thinking franchises, they're now opening up effectively kind of test subject stores, right, that they're running. And you want to prove the concept that, all right, was it the owner himself or herself really making this thing successful? Or does this thing actually have legs? Got it. Is it going to work in a different city, different demographic, different community, different financial area, right?

And so step number one is you want to prove the concept. And this is what we do with Fit Body Boot Camp. we knew that fitness boot camps were doing well outdoors, but there was a lot of limitations. The weather, right? Which means it's seasonal, unless you're in California or Florida. It was seasonal. Because it's outdoors, you couldn't really use a lot of fitness equipment,

and so you're limited to what you can do. And because it's outdoors, you can't really charge what you could charge if it was in a beautiful fitness studio environment that had all these equipment, right? And so I knew that there was three big glaring problems. Those were the three. Well, what if we move indoors like I had? with my personal training gyms. But everyone I would talk to, you know, no, no, no, boot camps are just a trend.

It's a fad. It's something the personal trainers do on the side to make a little extra money. No one really looked at it as a legitimate business. So effectively, I was the guy that said, well, I'm going to take this donut cut in half and put a scoop of ice cream in it and see if it works. And then sell those people boot camp memberships. Yes, exactly. They'll need it after eating all the ice cream.

They will absolutely need it afterwards. And, you know what, speaking of which, we should start partnering with afters the ice cream. Yeah, now that I think about it. Note to self. Yeah. And so what we did is we opened up our first location in Costa Mesa. Then we found some of our best trainers within there. So kind of step two is you find your best trainers who have as close to your passion and enthusiasm and work ethic. And you go, hey, look, I'm going to fund location two, three, and four. And you're going to run two, you're going to run three, you're going to run location four. Does it still work in different communities

that you're not running, right? If the answer is yes, then you're ready to scale. Okay. So you've almost kind of answered my first question, which is who do you need in place first? Is it, you know, the store manager, it is a salesperson, is an operations person. What do you need in order to go to multiple locations? Well, what you need to do is you need to replace yourself. And the number one thing you're going to, you do probably, if you're a one location store, is you make the sales and you do the marketing. So you go, all right, who am I going to get? And basically in our FitBody Boot Camp locations, we call them location managers. Their job is to run the marketing campaigns and get those leads and convert them into paying clients. And then the trainers deliver the coaching and the results and our assistants, our admins, make sure the clients are paying. They're caught up on their payments. They're not missing sessions.

If they are, they're being texted and called and reminded to come in. And so the very first person you have to replace is yourself, the person who does the marketing, lead generation, and selling. And they have to be as good as you or better. Here's why. When you're going to location two now, you're walking into an unpredictable environment. You're stacking the odds in your favor the best you can by checking the demographics. Do people here like ice cream? Or in my case, can they afford workouts? Do they have the reality in our world? Is the female population high enough for a fit body boot camp to go into this area? Check, check, check. Well, now, in case my manager quits, in case that area was not a good area.

area, what am I going to do if the poop does hit the fan? And so you've got to start thinking of contingencies. Yeah, you're going to hire a manager who knows how to lead generate and sell, but you're going to create systems in place. And here at FitBody Boot Camp, we call that the alien abduction manual. Every single one of us in here, myself included in the team members behind the cameras and everyone upstairs has an alien abduction manual. It's a three ring binder, and we also back it up redundancy on Google Docs on every

single thing we do, passwords to accounts, how we answer the phone, the top top 20 most frequently asked questions, if they're in support, both via email and phone. How do we deliver the coaching to our clients so that if someone got abducted by an alien, that we can find someone who's got the talent, plug them in, and within 24 to 48 hours go, here's their manual. They should be able to deliver 80% of the results. Got it. So you hire the talent, but then you create the alien abduction manual as a fail safe.

Awesome. Awesome. So just changing gears a little bit. What are some of the businesses that have scaled and scaled rapidly? that you like and that you're learning from on a regular basis that you say aha in this industry even though it's not the same as mine here are some big lessons i can take away whether it's from a restaurant and it could be from one that actually is making mistakes like chipotle now is making mistakes and you know some other fitness franchises have made mistakes so who are you looking

and learning from right now you know funny to say that because every month i do a study on two franchises one that's failed one that's been successful okay and so i'll give you a And by the way, they're outside of my, some are in my industry, somewhere outside. One that I did probably about four months ago was Curves. Yeah. I mean, Curves really is serving the market that Fit Body Boot Camp is serving. So for all intensive purposes, curves should not have gone to 13,000 locations and then collapse upon itself.

In mid-2006, they were just over 13,000 locations worldwide, and now they're under like 2,000 locations. The reason for that is, and this is what I want to, I want to research, like, why are they, why did they go under what happened how can I make sure this never happens to us is they had a program that didn't deliver results oh it created an environment where female clients can come in and work out together in a community so it created the aerobics class environment yeah but with exercise equipment but people were not getting the results and the price point wasn't high enough ironically curves wasn't charging enough to hire personal trainers to deliver the results right

People just walked in and did the thing. Yeah, yeah. There was like an admin there who, you know, turned on the set tape or CD and, you know, the music plays and it's like, hey, rotate stations. Got it. But at the end of the day, you need a human to high five you. Say your name. Hey, welcome, Craig. Hope you're having a good day.

How are the kids? How's that knee? I know your knee was hurting. That's what creates the community as well. Hey, Craig, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. Come on. Let's see if we can get you to push yourself a little harder. Because if we're not getting results, even if we're only paying $49 a month, we're going to stop going.

Sure. People sign up to a gym to get results. not to have access to equipment. So even though we charge more, 147 to 197 a month, our coaches deliver results, they know you by first name, we always break the touch factor with every single client, every single day, and we do the follow-up, we keep them in a private Facebook group. By doing all these things, we really keep them engaged and making sure they get results.

And so if they're getting results, so I did that study, and I go, okay, this is why curves failed, we're going to make sure our clients get results. They feel loved, understood, and appreciated, right? Awesome. So what are some of the other obstacles to see? to scaling aside from some personnel obstacles that you just described there. But what are some other obstacles? Is it real estate?

Is it luck? Is it really having that culture built in? It is three things. It's culture, systems, and leadership. Okay. And again, when you're a one-person show, you may not be a great leader, but by virtue of enthusiasm and this will of success, you're going to make it. That doesn't mean that you're a great leader.

certainly doesn't mean you have great systems in place. Or that you can open a second location. Exactly. And I say that because I was that guy. Remember, I'm writing a book on leadership right now called Man Up because I had to man up and become an effective leader, get clarity on my vision, and build a high-performance team around me to finally scale Fit Body Boot Camp to its greatest potential.

Right. Up until then, Fit Body Boot Camp was struggling. It was on the deathbed. You know this. And I was constantly taking its pulse. Is this thing going to die or what? Right? In 2011 and 12 and 13.

And so you have to become a good. great leader. And so because I was in the business myself and I was doing the selling, I was doing the marketing. Looks like we were growing. But the moment that I started going, oh my gosh, we're growing big. I need to get a new sales person on board. I need to outsource my marketing. Well, I didn't have vision to tell my sales reps what we're looking for by way of selling, how to sell the clients or the prospects into franchise locations. I didn't have the correct vision to work with the marketing guys. And so I just said, you know, here's our fan page, go market, we need leads. But they were just getting as leads who were unqualified and I really didn't understand and didn't want to communicate

well to them. The bottom line is leadership is issue number one. Culture is two. You have to get the entire team and clients behind you on your vision. Because if your clients go or your customers say, you know what, you're leaving to open up location two, three, four, and five, we're now the red-headed stepchild. You don't care for us? You know, that's not the case. I have a vision of helping 100 million people worldwide by the year 2025. For that to happen, I must open more locations worldwide because through all those locations, I'm going to be able to train people worldwide. And they go, oh, wow, I want to be part of your 100 million person vision. Oh, yeah, that works. Right? So that's the culture, the vision. You've got to get your team and your clients behind you.

Otherwise, you go to open up location too. They just look at it that you're going to greener pastures and you're leaving us behind. Yeah, and I can speak to that vision thing and mission thing. because when I started Turbulin Straining and started the Turbism Training certification in 2011, as soon as I said that I wanted to help a million people transform their lives, I would get emails from strangers around the world. How can I help? How can I be a part of this? And it goes back to the old saying that people want to be part of something bigger than themselves. And so when you build that culture and vision together through your leadership,

then you're able to attract those people, attract opportunity, and attract the ability to replicate and scale. Yeah, that's exactly right. And of course, the third thing is, and it's not a sexy thing. man, it's systems. You know, and I always say break the word system down. It's save yourself time, effort, and money. That's what system stands for as far as I'm concerned. But nobody wants to create the systems because your job isn't to run the business. Your job is to run the systems, the systems run the business. And so you've got to have marketing systems, admin systems,

coaching systems. What happens when a pull-up bar is broken? What happens when vanilla ice cream is out? Your vendor says vanilla ice cream is out. What are you? Do you replace it with chocolate or do you replace it with strawberry, you probably replace it with the next bestseller. Do you have a system in place so that when you have a 16-year-old high school kid going, oh, vanilla's out, do they just leave that bin empty or do they fill it up with the next best seller? Without the systems in place, you now have an empty bin while you're opening up location two, three, and four, and location one is starting to tank. Right. See, normally we don't see it, though, until it's already on fire, and now we're trying to put the fire out, right? Right. But it's not a sexy thing to make

systems and so people always begrudgingly make a system. Right because that's where probably most of these really great businesses that could scale and could replicate start to just get stuck and spinning their wheels because they get one step forward and then they have to go back and fix the next one and they get one step forward and they have to go back and fix another one right? And by the way, each time that happens, you just described a perfect scenario. One step forward, go back and fix. One step forward to go back and fix. Each time you go back and fix, it's like you take another layer of patience off and soon you start losing. in your patience, your sanity, your relationship, your health, your mindset, it starts chipping

away at you because each time you have to come back to fix this, you feel defeated, you feel like an imposter. And so why not fix it first? I always tell people, you want to know if you have systems in place? Go away on a one-month vacation. That way you can come back from your vacation if they go, boss, the place is on fire, we need you. Instead of signing a- But you'll come back and it's burned to the ground. Right, right. Instead of signing a lease, across town building it out hiring a staff and then going oh my gosh location one is on fire I can't do anything about it go away on a one-month vacation if you can go away and come back a month later the place is still running sustaining growing congratulations

you've created systems replicated at the next location so that is like the litmus test like how am I going to figure out if my great idea here can go to multiple locations is do all those things leadership culture and systems and then disappear disappear okay and if you can disappear from your one location come back and it's actually actually growing and evolving and actually delivering results. Dude, I'll come back into this building after, like you and I are leaving tomorrow to go speak at an event for three days. I'll come back and there'll be new systems in place that are generating us more money, making us more efficient. I put the time in, finally, when I manned up to become a better leader and create those systems,

or at least to create the people, bring on the people to help me create the systems. And now I can go away and come back and the place is always better. If I go away and come back and it's the same or less, I'm an ineffective leader. I must tend to my garden. Interesting. So I think that we'll wrap up here on a big lesson is that when we started off this conversation, we were talking about replicating a business. But at the end of the day, it's about replicating people, right?

It's replicating people. And to that point, I do want to stress one more thing to our viewers and listeners here, which is you've got to be patient, man. I know the ego wants multiple locations. I'm going to give you a great example here, and then I'll let you wrap it up here. We have, I've got a client, and he does, actually Stephen Hadley. Yeah. You know him.

He does about $80,000 a month from his Fit Body Boot Camp location. So he's one of our friends. One location, definitely Alabama. Now, we've got this other client who goes, hey man, I want to open up multiple locations. Well, why do you want to open up multiple locations? I want to make, you know, $80,000 a month. And I figure each one, if I open up four, each one can make $20,000 a month. I go, you do realize Stephen Hadley has one location, and he's making $80,000 a month.

Going back to what you always say, he uses every part of the pig. Oh, yeah. Right? He sells supplements. He sells gear. He does the Fit Body Forever program for the aging adults and baby boomers. And he is maximizing, and he's constantly pumping out transformation before and after pictures, transformation stories, always delivering value to the community.

So he is the highest price service, which means higher profit margins, right? And he only has one location, one team, one set of clients to worry about. So he only has one set of overhead. That's it. That's it. This other guy did not want to listen to my advice. The ego took over in that I'm a multi-location owner. And I got multiple teams and multiple clients.

And I'm in four parts of the city. And today, he's struggling. And it's an unfortunate thing because... You have four leases. You got four team managers. Four franchise agreements. Now, I'm willing to help him with his franchise agreements. But I don't think his landlords are willing to let him out of his five-year lease.

Right. And so he's screwed. Well, he's not screwed because now the team has jumped on board, our team and his team, and we're making him into a better leader. But what if you put the ego aside and you said, I'm just going to focus on this one location, make it into a Stephen Hadley location where it's making $70,000 a month, dial in my system so hard that I can go away for a month and come back and it's still working and then go to location too. So patience, and put the ego aside and you will truly succeed. Patience with your people, that's how you replicate and scale your business, building empire. Thanks for listening to the Empire Podcast Show. Remember to subscribe on iTunes, share it with your friends, and give us a rating. We'd really appreciate that.

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