Sitting in the office on day one of our recently purchased gym business, my business partner Ryan and I were staring at our worst nightmare.

The books were cooked and what was sold to us as a gym showing there was X amount of members to provide a slight profit, was actually a gym in the red and with nowhere near the members we had been told.

*Lesson learned: do more due diligence and don’t take people’s word for things

We spent all our money on purchasing the gym, leaving limited options when it came to marketing.

You see all the billboards, Valpak coupons, radio ads, etc. and don’t realize how many thousands of dollars they cost!

A lot of these so-called fitness business experts will tell you to outsource everything and only do the 5% you need to do as the owner. This is true at a certain point, but in my experience, not in the beginning.

This mindset actually sets people up for failure.

The truth is in the beginning, you need to hustle and do whatever it takes.

One good thing about having your back against the wall is you find out what you are made of.

By back against the wall I mean:

• voluntarily quitting your full-time job
• spending your entire savings on a broken business
•  and looking at a projection of -$500 for the first month

Yeah, things were looking and feeling grim.

If we didn’t sign up new members we would not be helping anybody and certainly be bankrupt in two months.

Ryan and I knew we needed to make people aware of the gym. As much as the ‘Field of Dreams’ motto “ If you build it, they will come” sounds great… it is not how things work.

Since we had no money we were going to be limited.

Thankfully, Ryan remembered one thing from the Golds Gym we worked at that the managers were supposed to do, but no one wanted to.

Door hangers.

Searching the interwebz we found a site where you could order like 1000 paper door hangers for $200. We put a free trial offer on the door hanger along with the phone number and hit the order button.

This was Plan A and Plan B for making our gym business succeed at the time.

Three days later we had our door hangers and fingers crossed.

We each took a bunch, split up and went walking.

4 hours a day minimum.

I would throw on my headphones and just walk, hanging a door hanger on each house. Eventually, it turned into a game of how many I could get out in x amount of time and we would compete with each other.

Then the phone started ringing.

And ringing.

We were getting interest and appointments set up left and right!

Ryan would schedule the appointments and make sure to be at the gym for interested people and I would make sure to keep getting the door hangers out.

Every day.

We rode this one strategy out for a year and a half. Not only did we get enough members to not lose money in the first month…

… we got enough to open another gym 1.5 years later.

Then a third gym in the next year.

Was it the perfect plan?

Probably not.

Eventually, should we have switched and hired someone to hang them?

Probably.

But it worked.

WHAT TO DO

The biggest lesson here is the power of one habit. We were in a tight spot and identified the most important thing we needed to do—build awareness.

Then we chose ONE THING to do and did it consistently.

No second guessing, no reading the pros and cons, no doubting.

Just doing.

At the time I grew to resent the door hangers due to walking 4 or 5 hours a day through neighborhoods not being that fun.

I can close my eyes and still see the routes I took and feel all the season changes. I remember slogging through snow, sweating through the summer, kicking through leaves in the fall…

Looking back I wouldn’t trade those days for the world.

They gave me the biggest and best lesson I could have ever learned.

Identify your goal. Next, take massive action on one thing that can move you towards that goal with relentless consistency and zero doubt.