by Mike Tuchscherer

I'm not exactly a wildly successful business man, but we do okay for ourselves here at RTS.  I'm still driving my little startup operation, but I can tell you some things I've learned over the past couple of years.
I remember reading Murphy's Laws of Combat at one point years ago.  If you don't know what that is, look it up sometime.  It's kind of entertaining if you are military minded at all or if you have a cynical sense of humor.  Anyway, one of the Murphy's Laws of combat says something along the lines of, "Easy things are always simple.  Simple things are always hard."  That sums up what I think about running a business, or getting stronger for that matter.
As another aside before I get to my main point -- I think a big part of why I like running a business is that it very much follows the same process of training.  You do X work and get Y results.  Then you tweak the amount of work you do, the kind of work, where the work is focused, etc.  Then you evaluate the growth and repeat the process.  It's very much the same thing to me.
Anyway, back to Murphy's Laws... Easy things are always simple.  Simple things are always hard.  Sounds paradoxical, doesn't it?  Well, I guess it is on the surface, but here's how I relate it to business.  The equation for business success is pretty easy from an academic perspective.  Good products + market awareness = profit.  That's simple.  And it should be easy to have a good product.  Most businesses start with a good product.  If you don't have a good product, then you're probably not all that interested in starting a business anyway.  Then market awareness is pretty simple too.  People have to know you exist and know what you offer them.
Now is where it starts to get hard.  A good product is simple in concept but production and delivery is not easy at all.  To be honest, books can and have been written about the product side.  It has to be valuable to the customer, but affordable for the business to produce.  Then there's the diligence and attentiveness required to ensure the appropriate quality of the product.  That requires you to be very self critical, which isn't easy when you're trying to bring a product to market in a timely fashion.  There's a ton that goes into providing a quality product, but you can sum it up by asking yourself, "Would I be willing to pay the asking price for the product I'm providing?"  If the answer is no, then you've got a lot of work to do.  If the answer is yes, then the question just changes.  Then the question becomes, "What could I be doing better?"
Market awareness is another thing altogether.  You can have the best product around and if people don't know you exist, then they can't buy from you.  And what's more -- since you've developed a truly great product -- if they don't know you exist, your product can't help the customers either!  They don't know you exist, so the mutually beneficial transaction can't take place!  That means you have to engage with people and not only let them know that you exist, but make it clear what kind of value you can bring to them.  This means some kind of marketing process.  Again, discussing the marketing process is a book by itself, so I don't know how much help this is going to be.  In my opinion, marketing is typically underrated among new businesses.  It's still surprising to me when I meet people who haven't heard of RTS.  It's been such a big part of my life, it surprises me when other people haven't heard of it.  But it just goes to show you how much marketing can be required.  When someone new discovers your business, there is a person -- a potential customer that can not only help your business, but that you can help in turn -- and they didn't even know you exist.
I read somewhere once that it takes an average of seven exposures to a product before a customer is willing to buy a product.  In my experience, it's far more than that.  So not only do they have to know you exist, you have to be able to demonstrate how you can help them.  Some products do this intrinsically.  If you're at the store looking for a shirt, you don't need a product rep from Hanes telling you why their t-shirts meet your needs.  You can pretty much look at the product and see how it works.  But if you're selling nutrition planning services or personal training, then your customer might not understand how you can help them.  And most of the time, it takes more than one explanation to get your point across.  If you're reading about a new exercise technique, most of the time the first time you read about it you might think it sounds neat, but you won't try it.  It takes some repetition before it sinks in.  That's why you had to study for tests in school -- you provided the repetition yourself through study.  Same thing with learning about new products.  If you want your customers to know about you, what you do, what products you provide, and how it can help them with what THEY want, then it will take some repetition.
There's literally a ton of info to share about marketing.  It's not something that comes naturally to me and I don't think I do a very good job of it personally.  But it does make a huge difference.  Things like image management and a host of other sub topics are all big enough on their own.  See how something simple can become hard?
At any rate, I want you to be encouraged.  Being in business is a tough road to go down, but so is strength training as a whole.  I personally find it very similar to the process I use to write and develop training programs, so that's something I find very enjoyable.  Get the easy things in place and then start developing more detail.  Get a great product and start making people aware of it.  Then as you improve, get more and more focused on the detail of the process.  But don't lose sight of that big picture stuff.  In the end, business is a pretty easy equation.  Although easy things are simple, simple things can get very hard.  But my guess is if you're in an iron sport, then you don't get scared away just because something is hard.

Mike Tuchscherer is the owner of Reactive Training Systems, a company dedicated to individualized physical training.  The goal of RTS is to help you become a dominant force in your sport!  Learn more by visiting www.ReactiveTrainingSystems.com.

Mike himself is an accomplished Powerlifter.  He has over 12 years of experience training and researching the best training methods in the world.  Mike has competed in raw and single ply competitions.  He recently won the Gold medal representing the USA at the 2009 World Games; becoming the first American male to ever win this distinction.  His best lifts in IPF competition are a 903 squat, a 644 bench press, an 826 deadlift, and a 2342 total in the 275 pound weight class.

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