Why Uniqueness is the ONLY Survival Strategy for Your Business – Dustin Bogle

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05/22/2023

Show Notes:

In the competitive market of today, being unique is the only way to win. So, if you want to build a business that stands the test of time, you need to develop a unique product or service that will truly serve your customers. Our guest today shares his tips.

Meet Dustin Bogle. Dustin is the Chief Executive Officer at Lead The Way Fitness. He’s a longtime entrepreneur, sales expert, and book author. He started his athletic career as a professional wrestler, learning the importance of perseverance, uniqueness, and hustle along the way. Then, he went on to open six gyms in 6 years in Southern California, where he was forced to meet the demands of the competitive market and point his business in the right direction. That took a lot of self-growth and personal development, turning Dustin into the inspirational entrepreneur that he is today. Currently, he’s helping Gym Owners delegate their tasks and free up their time.

His latest book “Reinforce Your Gym” is packed with useful business lessons and golden strategies which are applicable across different businesses and industries.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the importance of being unique in business, how to build your hustle muscle, how to create an emotional connection with your customers, and why communication is key.

If you want to learn more about growing and scaling a business, make sure you tune into this episode to hear what Dustin has to say.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Dustin Bogle

💡 What he does: He’s the Chief Executive Officer at Lead The Way Fitness.

💡 Noteworthy: Dustin was a professional wrestler in his late teens and early 20s, then eventually opened his first gym. He went on to open six gyms in 6 years and had some major business learning lessons along the way.

💡 Key Quote: “Now you’re swimming in what they call that red ocean. All the sharks are trying to eat the same fish. It’s bloody water, and you’re competing with everybody. You want to get to the blue ocean where you stand tall, and there’s no competition.”

💡 Where to find Dustin: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Be unique. One of the most vital things that every business owner should determine is what’s unique about their business. If you’re not unique, you’re just like everything else, which means you’re less memorable. So, make sure you discover your unique value proposition. Dustin explains, “When I would coach, I would tell the coaches on our team, what’s your character when you step on the stage, you need to be unique. You can’t just be a coach that knows how to do a pushup. You’re very forgettable, and they’re just going to shop around for the cheapest one. That’s when you become a commodity is when you’re a me-too product. So the same thing to business owners. Ask yourself, what am I doing to be unique?”

Build your hustle muscles. Running a business is no walk in the park. You need to roll up your sleeves and get to work today if you want to see results tomorrow. There’s no secret recipe to success; you simply need to build your hustle muscles and work your way to the top. Dustin says, “Essentially, what I mean by that is we, as business owners, especially if you really use a lot of digital marketing, have become atrophied and become really lazy because you can really just get just lazy having digital leads brought to you all day long off of Facebook ads, Google ads, et cetera. And so it just can feel like the easiest thing, I just turn on this marketing, and the leads come in. But we’re finding more and more people are not getting good quality leads.”

Create feelings for your customers. People will always remember how your brand message made them feel. That’s why it’s so critical to focus on feelings rather than sales or marketing strategies. Create powerful stories and connect to your audience. Dustin says, “We’re out to create a feeling, and if your marketing doesn’t have any emotions and a feeling, it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re running a sale for 50% off.’ What’s the feeling? There’s nothing there. Tell stories. Why did you, as the business owner, decide to open this business? What’s the stories about your customers? What’s the story behind your mission? Tell stories. Get people to feel things and watch your marketing really improve and get more attention on it.”

Communication is key. There’s no limit to what you can achieve in life if you develop strong communication skills. According to Dustin, good communication skills is what makes successful people so successful. He explains, “I think by far the number one root of all team problems is communication. And it could be written, it could be verbal, but I think 80% of it is in a written format. If you look at the fights that happen on social media, it’s because it’s just two people being keyboard warriors. But if you had them sit in a chair across from one another, I bet they wouldn’t be saying the things they’re saying, and I bet they wouldn’t feel the way they feel.”

Top Quotes

“What got me here was kind of like my background story, and you know how they say? Your mess becomes your message.”

“The lesson that I learned was on that flight home was about how emotionally charging money can be for people. So the promoter look at that, because he wasn’t a good marketer, he couldn’t sell enough tickets. He ended up in jail, and his company went under. The mob was angry and literally wanted to kill us because their money was taken, and no refund was given. And then I was stuck helpless in another country with no way to get home because I didn’t have any money to my name. So all these feelings I felt, the feelings the crowd felt, the feelings the promoter felt, all came because of the choices we made around money.”

“You don’t want to make it unique just to make it unique. You want to connect it to ‘How am I going to help my customers through a unique method or process?’”

“The marketplace will humble you if you’re not ready. But secondly, it wasn’t our workouts that were magical. It was the feelings we created and the culture, and I just didn’t know at that time that that’s what I was really scaling.”

“One of the best ways for us to get leads is just regular or consistent content. And a lot of owners, ‘I don’t like being on camera. I don’t know what to write. I’m not a creative.’ Well, you’ve got to get someone else on your team or hire a third party or just face it head-on and do it yourself, but you just can’t run from making content in today’s world. And so, again, just that very simple consistency will help.”

“Leadership’s all the invisible stuff that you can’t see going on, and that, to me, is the glue that holds the business together and also grows it. And you show me a great business, you’re showing me a great leader. And so that’s essentially what I would say is the big learning lesson that took me way too long, Tyler, to learn, is to just build my leadership muscle.”