The Four Core Competencies covered in Intrinsic Excellence are: Technical Expertise, Customer Care, Sales and Business Development/Strategy. As the author puts it, "Mastery of your art cannot be confused with success in the profession." Most of those who fail as personal trainers fail because they mistake their necessary technical expertise as the principle predictor of financial success in their field. "Not so" is Rolando Garcia III’s response to this perception—and it holds true for almost any other profession.
Technical expertise is at best only 25% of the success-formula… Without a thorough grounding in the other three core competencies, the trainer is doomed to mediocrity and will most likely not survive in the industry.
Intrinsic Excellence not only provides a masterful exposition of the role and function of each core competency, but also weaves the four core competencies into a dynamic, interactive program—shot through with the flesh and blood tales of struggle and success within the trenches of the personal training world.
Most unique to Intrinsic Excellence is the insistence on a heart-based approach to the relationship with the customer—where every interaction is evaluated through the prism of a deep commitment to humanity, to self-worth and to leadership as inspirational partnership.
Personal training clients see their trainers anywhere up to 144 times a year—which is way more contact-time than with any other professional or, for that matter, most relatives. According to Rolando Garcia III, the personal trainer’s relationship with a client is therefore of immense potential significance. The personal trainer becomes an inspirational model that their customers aspire to emulate. The high-level personal trainer embodies that elusive alchemy of athleticism, intellect and singularity of purpose that is the cornerstone for success.
Rolando sees the personal trainer as having the power to represent a resurgent ideal: the self-possessed individual. Through fitness and exercise they have gained command of their life and they have a chance to effect that same transformation on their clients—a gift worth its weight in gold.
Rolando Garcia III makes a profound case for the Personal Trainer as a kind of modern day hero-in-waiting—with the dramatic potential to act as a primary Success Agent in their customers’ lives. Therefore, Intrinsic Excellence—as its title implies—is a philosophy of life-at-full-engagement, as much as it is a detailed battle plan for overcoming any challenge or realizing any long-held fitness dream…
Intrinsic Excellence has a wisdom-soaked authority to its advice—born from Rolando Garcia III’s evident experiential immersion in his subject matter, a fierce intelligence, a deep commitment to values and a heartfelt desire to help both his fellow trainers and his clients lead deeper, more fulfilled lives.
To absorb the life-lessons revealed with such generosity in Intrinsic Excellence is to stack the career deck in one’s favor—regardless of one’s profession. Intrinsic Excellence is at once a call-to-arms, a message of hope and a vision of the heights that can be achieved when heart marries science in the quest for a greater well-being.
About Rolando Garcia III
Rolando Garcia, III has been described as one of the top managers in the fitness industry. Using the system he created, he has prepared and developed fitness teams as well as individual professionals for the demands and rigors of the fitness profession, which led to their subsequent success. He currently manages an elite team of coaches for a luxury fitness facility, which is located in Manhattan, NY. He has been featured in Forbes, The NY Post, Self Magazine, and Athlete’s Quarterly.
Praise for INTRINSIC EXCELLENCE
"Intrinsic Excellence unlocks the secrets of creating value in service industries through a thoughtful study of the client relationship and a recognition of its priority over technical expertise. Set within the author's experience in fitness and training, its powerful perspectives should be understood by anyone whose business model is selling expertise directly to clients."—CHARLES STUCKE, CEO Lepercq de Neuflize Asset Management
"Rolando Garcia III is one of the most brilliant minds the personal training industry has ever known. Like myself, Garcia has risen to the top of the game in one of the most competitive markets in the world: New York City. That's no easy task.
The 4C Method is the voice of years of experience, expertise and common sense. A trainer's role is hard to define, but Mr. Garcia really ‘gets it’. Rolando knows that what really makes or breaks a training career is not just the caliber of your workouts, but also your ability to master customer care, client acquisition and personal training sales. Rolando Garcia is clearly an expert on the science of training; what makes him unique is his expertise on business development and strategy. If you are entering the industry and do not know what to expect, you have to buy this book!"—DANNY KAVADLO, author, Everybody Needs Training
"I've been a gym owner for six years and taught certifications to coaches all over the world. Intrinsic Excellence is my new ‘read this first’ for personal trainers. Rolando guides you through all the things that are actually important for driving business and personal success. The practical advice runs parallel to stories of the confirmed success of these concepts through his career of turning around personal training businesses.
If you want to be successful as a personal trainer this book is an absolute must. A blueprint that tells you step by step what you need to do, where to put your focus, and how to achieve the desired outcome. This is now required reading for any trainer at my gym. This will change lives and help coaches live better. I strongly suggest you "read this first!"—MAX SHANK, author, Master the Kettlebell
The Wharton School of Fitness
"Like the fitness business, the restaurant business looks glamorous, creative and exciting when viewed from the outside. Those in the restaurant business understand the harsh realities of running a quality eatery. The first cold hard slap in the face is the inconvenient fact that 80% of new restaurants fail within the first two years. For the vast majority of restaurant owners, kitchen dreams morph into bankruptcy nightmares. If you want to understand the reality of restaurants, read Tony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential or Joe Bastianich’s Restaurant Man. If you want to understand the realities of professional fitness, read Rolando Garcia’s Intrinsic Excellence.
Here is another inconvenient fact: 70% of fulltime personal trainers certified in 2016 will be out of the fitness business within two years. Why the monumental washout rate? One man has the answer. "75% of what drives a personal trainer’s success has nothing to do with personal training." That statement of cold fact is one of the numerous pearls of wisdom to be found in Rolando Garcia’s new book, Intrinsic Excellence. The subtitle captures the theme. "Business development and leadership systems for success in personal training."
Intrinsic Excellence is the new business bible for the modern personal trainer. Frankly, I think it should be required reading for anyone even remotely considering going into fitness on a professional basis—and all the more if you are considering becoming a facility owner. If you are a personal trainer and want to learn how to thrive in the jungle that is professional fitness, beg, borrow or steal a copy of Intrinsic Excellence. This is a survival guide for the modern personal trainer.
First off, you have to survive, you have to last; you have to be around long enough to develop a following. You obtain a following by having the skills to obtain real results for regular people. Transformational skills border on magical, yet this alchemic ability to conjure up dramatic physical results for clients accounts for a scant ¼ of the success equation. You can be the greatest physiological transformational expert on the face of the planet—and starve in obscurity. Many have, more will.
Rolando pins the tail on the fitness donkey by identifying the four big check squares needed to attain success: technical expertise, business development and strategy, customer care and sales. These four categories comprise Rolando’s 4-C Method, The Four Competencies. The key to fitness success, the key to longevity in the business of fitness, is an overall understanding of what is required. What is required is a recognition and subsequent mastery of the four competencies.
The 4-Cs need be practiced in a balanced and even-handed fashion. Do not neglect or ignore any of the Four Competencies; this is not a fitness cafeteria where you can select or reject those systemic aspects you like while turning your nose up at others aspects you find unpalatable. The 4-Cs are an indivisible unit. Rolando presents an integrated, intertwined and interrelated system wherein all the broad questions are identified, discussed and solved within the two covers of this taut, lean, fat-free, fluff-free book.
This book should be required reading for anyone contemplating becoming a fulltime fitness professional. There is a way in which to have it all and Rolando has blazed the path: you can make a great living doing the right thing by the clients (getting them results) while obtaining incredible job satisfaction. It all falls into place by paying attention to the business end of the personal training. If the Wharton School of Business had a fitness business chair, Intrinsic Excellence would be the textbook. This book immediately becomes the Gold Standard on the subject of the business of fitness."—MARTY GALLAGHER, author, The Purposeful Primitive and co-author of Strong Medicine
