Chris Cooper's Blog, page 44
April 4, 2024
Exactly How They Drove Gym Revenue Up 3.5X
Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Big gross revenue in gyms. What’s the secret? You’re going to find out today. My name is Mike Warkentin. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and my guest is going to open his vault and tell you how he earned a spot on our Top 10 leaderboard for revenue in January 2024. Chad Pinter’s been here before. He earned a spot on our leaderboard for net owner benefit—that’s what he paid himself—almost a year ago to the day. You cannot pay yourself without revenue and profit. So, we’re going to dig into that today. But first I’m going to remind you: Our leaderboard for January 2024 for monthly revenue ran from $58,000 U.S. to $125,000. Now that’s six-figure revenue. This is a CrossFit gym, $58,000 to $125,000 if you can believe it. Chad earned a spot on that list, and we’re going to talk to him. Chad, how are you from Denver today?
Chad Pinther (00:48):
Alright, thanks Mike. Really an honor to be back again. Thank you so much.
Mike Warkentin (00:52):
I was saying to you before the show: I love circling back to talk to people I’ve spoken to before because it shows the evolution of what they’re doing, and it shows sustainability and consistency, and that’s a big theme when we talk to some of the people on this leaderboard. A lot of them said, “These numbers aren’t out of the ordinary.” It’s not crazy one-hit-wonders. This is sustainable stuff. You’ve been able to do this as well. So, I want to dig in, and I’m going to ask you, tell me anything you can about your revenue streams—rough approximations, whatever you got: What goes into your big number?
Chad Pinther (01:19):
Sure. Yeah. So, our biggest number, about 78%, is our group, right? That’s the big chunk for the gym. It’s the main focus. And then we’ve got about 15%, which is a decent amount of personal training. And that’s definitely increased, and I can kind of talk about that over the last year. And then, 3% nutrition, merchandise is 2%. And then we’ve got some specialty programs. It’s about 1%, and then, some drop in is around 1% as well. So, the big two are the group and the PT.
Mike Warkentin (01:56):
OK. And I want to circle back, and I want to ask about the PT growth, but first give me the 60-second summary of Colfax Strong Strength and Conditioning. You said you’re a CrossFit affiliate, but you also run strength and conditioning brand as well. Talk to me about what you sell, who’s your market, what are you doing there?
Chad Pinther (02:10):
Sure. So yeah, we’re located pretty much downtown Denver. Have just under 9,000-square-foot facility. Our demographic is pretty young, a lot of working young professionals—late twenties, early thirties on average—living in close proximity to the gym. We have around two—it runs from 240 to 260 members in the gym. And yeah, so we’re still contained in a CrossFit affiliate. So, we’re definitely under the CrossFit brand. That’s the programming in the gym except our PT, which is all individualized work and programming for them. But the original gym started in 2013, and we bought it in 2019 and took over at that point.
Mike Warkentin (03:05):
OK. OK. So that’s interesting. So, you’re running essentially a group model, but you’re adding on extra things. I’m going to ask you this question first because when I got—I think when my gym, we ran a similar model—I think I got to it in the range of 200, 220 members, something like that. But my revenue was nowhere near what you guys are putting up monthly. Talk to me a little bit about like, how are you doing that? Like do you have any average revenue per member kind of general ideas there, or how are you putting together so much revenue with so few members? And I don’t mean the 240 is not a large number, but I had getting close to that number, and my revenue was not that.
Chad Pinther (03:35):
Sure. Yeah. Well, and I have to always give credit to Two-Brain. We got involved in Two-Brain at the very beginning. I always want to reiterate that. Very grateful for what they’ve done for us. I always tell people the story of when I first started it—and actually I can’t credit my myself; my wife, actually, Esther, is the other owner in the gym, and when I was looking to try to get off the airplanes and all the flying and all that because I’ve been doing modeling for a little over 20 years, I asked her, I said, “What should we do?” And she said, “Well, we love doing CrossFit. Let’s open a CrossFit gym.” And I told her that I thought that was a crazy idea and not possible. The main concern I had is I didn’t know what I was doing, and I literally got on the computer, and I typed in “How do you run a CrossFit gym?”
Chad Pinther (04:24):
And one of the first things that came up was Two-Brain Business. And I started doing some research into the company, into Coop and everybody, and did a couple calls and realized that I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I needed a lot of help. So, they’ve helped us a lot from the beginning, helped us through the pandemic, given us a plan at every step in the game. And one of the things that’s really big for us is how we’ve changed the evolution of how someone comes into the gym, number one, and number two, related to that, our client avatar, so to speak. Right? I think in the beginning we were like, “Come on, let’s take everybody. Let’s get as many as we can.” We had all these different pricing structures and everything; some of that we inherited.
Chad Pinther (05:12):
And through work with our mentor, we found a lot of things we needed to kind of standardize. And we used to have the old model of, “Alright, let’s bring somebody in the gym and try a class, right? And then, if you like it, let’s get rolling.” And we did have like a small-group model, like onboarding process. And one of the things that my mentor kept telling me was this whole No Sweat Intro idea, right? And I kept thinking, “This just isn’t—that can’t work.” I thought, “They really want to try it,” you know, and I should have listened from the start. We should have followed that model, but I kept thinking they had to try it, or they weren’t going to want it, right? And the reality was I started seeing a lot of situations where people coming into the gym and then they’re stepping out on the floor, and they were completely like deer in headlights, didn’t know what was going on, right? And sure, especially for something like our gym where we do sometimes highly technical movements, Olympic movements, gymnastics. Imagine stepping a brand-new person out on the floor, and you doing overhead squat or barbell snatch or like bar muscle ups or something, right?
Mike Warkentin (06:28):
I can’t do that. I’m out. Not for me.
Chad Pinther (06:30):
Right. Right. And that would—that happened a lot. So finally, we adopted that, and the next thing, the next evolution for us, which changed our average revenue per member, which right now sits about 255.
Mike Warkentin (06:44):
Yeah, there you go. It’s a big number.
Chad Pinther (06:46):
And then our length of engagement is around 16 months as well.
Mike Warkentin (06:50):
Oh, that is way—that is double the industry average. Just FYI listeners.
Chad Pinther (06:54):
Awesome. What we changed was, as a team, we got together—getting a lot of feedback from our team—we still looked out on the floor and thought, “They’re not moving the way we want them to move. They’re not at the standard we want.” And we really realized that the way that that was going to be best achieved was to go to a more personal training model, bringing people in. So, we came up with a plan of doing a minimum three personal training sessions. And this is for even your seasoned CrossFit people. We’ve had people come in, you know, “I’ve been doing CrossFit for 15 years.” And OK, well, as we all know, myself included, even if you think you’ve got it all, if you sit down with somebody and go over some things, there’s things you can work on. And so, we got three and then there’s four and then six for like brand-new people. And so, that changed a lot because now we actually have definitive personal training sessions that come with every member. And we bring in probably anywhere from 15 to 25ish new members per month on average.
Mike Warkentin (08:07):
And they all come in with personal training as a start? Beauty.
Chad Pinther (08:10):
Correct. Correct. Yep. That was a big piece to kind of boosting that. In addition, another thing that we did in the last, let’s see, almost nine months ago, is we hired, made the decision to hire a sales director. Right? This was a big, big change for us. It was something that, from a financial standpoint, was pretty scary because to cover the cost—when I looked up how much you have to pay a sales director, I immediately thought, “Absolutely not. This won’t work.” OK. But once again, got some feedback from Lisa, who’s our mentor, and she actually put me in contact with another gym that had actually done this and successfully done it. So, I reached out to them and actually spoke to their sales director and made the decision to not only hire our own, but to get some consulting done with their sales director. So, we invested a fair amount of money in that too. And the reason why we got into the sales director was one: I thought that, overall, it would probably benefit us massively from a financial standpoint. My question was: How long was it going to take to replace that income, right? And then get over the top of that hump.
Mike Warkentin (09:36):
So what happened? I’ve got to know; like, this is incredible.
Chad Pinther (09:38):
Yeah. It was actually a necessity from a personal standpoint, to be honest, because my wife and I, we were working the 100-hour workweeks, right? Even delegating things out as we’re taught, there was just a lot we were doing. And the biggest sort of drain on our personal life with the work-life balance was we were staying in the gym till 8 p.m. three, four nights a week because we’re doing these new client meetings, right? And my wife, literally in her brilliance as much as it was to start the business, she said, “We can’t do this anymore.” Right? “We don’t have a life. We need to—” And she said, “I think we need to get somebody to do this.” So once again, I told her, “It’s not possible. She’s crazy,” just like all this stuff. And she’s like, “We need to do this.”
Chad Pinther (10:28):
So that started the process, got some definite coaching from our mentor, and then we went for it. And so the advice I got was, “Alright, Chad, you’re going to—you need to understand that you’re going to take three months of the cost of that person, and you might as well accept you’re going to burn it, right? Because it’s going to take about that long to get on top if”—this was the key—”if it’s going to work.” Now it wasn’t just stepping into this with this blind sort of, “Well, I hope it works.” Like the reality is we are lucky in the Denver area in the sense that we have a very large influx of new potential members and leads, right? So, I think this could be a challenge for people maybe in different rural areas, right?
Chad Pinther (11:27):
But for us, it was—I feel like, OK, there’s enough people coming in. I knew the leads, right? And at this point, we weren’t even doing any paid advertising, which is another thing we can change; I can comment on. We started doing that as well. So, we went for it. He came in, and it was like we never looked back. He signed—so my close rate for the whole team because we had our coaches doing it before; they were doing all the meetings and my wife and I—and our close weight was around, it could be 40%, 50%, and Sean’s is around 75% to 80%.
Mike Warkentin (12:10):
Wow. So like double in some cases.
Chad Pinther (12:12):
Right? So, he went—his first month broke the record, and we signed, I think it was 33 new members, so it was just staggering, right? So, he’s just come in and crushed it. And it only—it took about three months when we started seeing, “OK, we got over what we paid him; we got our life back.” At the same time also, we started some paid advertising. I wanted to kind of work through—we would have slumps sometimes in those leads. And I wanted to kind of work through that. We got some additional mentoring with Colm there. A couple different times I connected him with Sean. I sat in on that. And so, we try to utilize that. I’m not sure if people know about that, but you can trade out your sessions. And I did that for a good period of time where you can take your mentorship session and set it aside and grab somebody else.
Mike Warkentin (13:10):
We have specialists on staff. Yeah. We’re happy to help you with paid marketing or other things you’re struggling with. Yep.
Chad Pinther (13:14):
Correct. Right. So, we did that a couple different times with Colm as we built out our Google ads, as we built out the Facebook, and he could kind of take a look over it, make sure we had it all set up correctly. And then Sean came with a bunch of experience already as far as what—how to do that. So, that was a big piece for us is bringing him on. And then he’s just slowly ratcheted up kind of our starting revenue, right? Like we get a report that tells us what’s our auto pay for next month, right? And he’s ratcheted that up quite a bit since he even first got started, so super grateful for that. And then, let’s see, another thing we’ve done is my wife decided she was going to take over the nutrition aspect of the gym.
Chad Pinther (14:13):
That’s something we struggled with over the last couple years. I don’t—I’m not sure why. I think the biggest thing is, for us, it was like we would—we hired externally to the gym. And I’ve just noticed that CrossFit, specifically in this microgym space, it’s all about sort of like that street cred. If you see someone there, you see their training, you see what they look like, right? And so, we had had some external people; I even tried getting like an RD for a while. I thought, well, the best, let’s get the best. And it actually was the worst. They weren’t training in the gym; they didn’t know the community, you know. So as soon as Esther took it on, within like two weeks, she had like 12 clients, right? So, she’s brought in right now, per month, about $2,000 in extra income just from nutrition itself.
Chad Pinther (15:13):
So that’s really like boosted it up over time. And then as far as retention pieces, which I think obviously goes into keeping that number and driving that number up. We’ve got an active CSM, and we’ve added layers to that each sort of new iteration of that as we’ve gone along to make sure that we’re not losing members because they’re unhappy, because we don’t know what’s happening. We have a very active goal review process. We’re huge fans of the 90-day goal reviews. In fact, we started seeing a drop off at about 45 days, right? One of the things we noticed when we brought in a sales director like Sean, he’s so good at sales that he gets people, I think, to sign up who are very new and may not even consider that, right? And they need a little more care.
Chad Pinther (16:11):
And so we started looking at, “OK, when are these people dropping off? When are they leaving?” And 90 days seemed like an eternity, right? And if you don’t have someone talking to you saying, “How are things going?” So, we now have a process where we go 45 days; there’s a connection there. There’s a quick sit down: “How are you doing? Is there anything we can help you out with your feedback—any sort of like way we can make this a better process?” And that’s helped save some memberships that maybe someone was like, “I’m not sure about this,” you know? So, we’ve started that process, and that’s kept our average revenue per member stable and growing over time.
Mike Warkentin (16:55):
Wow. So listeners, I’m going to give you a quick recap here of the highlight reel, because this is right out of the Two-Brain playbook. Everything Chad laid out, there’s really cool aspects to it. So, first thing, you got a group model, but then you’re starting to bring people in with a free consultation and personal training, right? So, you’re bringing them in, not just dumping them to group classes like I did, and this is why Chad’s number was better than mine ever was because he’s doing free consultations, bringing them in with personal training, no matter how much experience they have—that boosts your average drive per member, and it improves retention. We have stats on that. And then they go into group classes. Some of them probably keep doing personal training. We might talk about that in a sec. From there, Chad did a really cool thing where he did some research and got a salesperson in place.
Mike Warkentin (17:34):
Now this is an investment, but he did the work ahead of time to find out, “Can I do this? How do I do this? What’s the reward here? What’s the cost? What’s the risk?” And put that in place. And then he started talking about marketing. It wasn’t marketing with a close rate that was at 40% or 50%. It was, “I have a guy who’s closing at like 75%, 80%. I’m going to supercharge this with some marketing, and these people are going to come in and more of them are going to sign up, which is going to make my investment and my ROI so much better as opposed to what I was doing where we ran marketing; I didn’t know how to sell. People came in the door; I couldn’t deal with it. And then my close rate was worse than 40%. I guarantee it. So, we got that.
Mike Warkentin (18:12):
From there, we’ve got extra programs. So, nutrition program is a great one. It’s a no brainer in a ton of gyms; it’s difficult to get them going at times. And there are various ways Chad talked about that you can struggle with it. Not a lot of gyms crush nutrition. Now that’s a stat from our State of the Industry Report. Some do. So, when you start, it might be 3% or 4%, but that’s still 3% or 4%. And nutrition programs can scale very quickly without a ton of space and a ton of equipment. And I know gym owners that are crushing 20% of gross revenue through nutrition programs. So that program can scale really, really well. And then the final piece I’ve got to highlight for you is retention. Chad mentioned the CSM; that’s a client success manager. The client success manager’s job is to retain clients. He also did some analysis of his client journey and said: Because our salesperson is crushing it and getting people in here, we might need some extra retention stuff earlier, as opposed to every 90 days, which is the standard. Adjusting it now every 45 days. We have more touch points; we’re retaining more members at a higher average revenue per member.
Mike Warkentin (19:11):
You see how this big snowball is rolling downhill and resulting in monthly revenue that’s over 50 grand. So, you guys can do that too. But again, it’s not everything at once. It’s targeted stuff step by step. Chad, I want to ask you specifically about your mentor. Did she give you specific steps like this? Because everything you just talked about is going to be super overwhelming for the average gym owner saying, “I don’t know how to deal with this.” Was it just like, “Let’s do this right now? Or how did that mentorship process go?”
Chad Pinther (19:37):
Yeah, well the good thing is, is all of this stuff exists in large part in the modules that are the—
Mike Warkentin (19:45):
Two-Brain resources for clients. Yeah.
Chad Pinther (19:46):
Right. So, you know, another thing I didn’t mention that is a big part of this is we also put together high-ticket items. Where we—
Mike Warkentin (19:56):
Oh yeah, there you go.
Chad Pinther (19:57):
—have all-inclusive sort of nutrition, personal training, class access, open gym, et cetera. And we even have a process with weekly mentorship sessions with our clients. And so that was something that basically she said, “OK, you want to do this?” She was doing it. And so, I knew I had resource there, and she said, “OK, take a look at this.” I did the research with the modules, and then I had someone to go to say, “OK, we’ve got these sorts of things we’re trying to work on now.” So, it was always very well guided of “Here’s what you want to do; do this now.” You know, so the process is really—I love Lisa. And her path is very directive, right? It’s not a therapy session of, “Oh, this is terrible. This is what’s going on,” right? It’s like, “OK, what’s the problem? Now, let’s have an action and specific steps to take for that.” And then your next session you’re talking about, “Did we take these steps?”
Mike Warkentin (21:10):
So, accountability. She checked in.
Chad Pinther (21:12):
Correct. Yep, I like that. I like that. It’s very directive. And then another piece that I wanted to kind of highlight too related to this that was also advised to us from the Two-Brain material and from Lisa was to move into more of a prescriptive model. And Sean was able to really take off with this because one of the problems with the way we were selling things was we were very limited in what we were presenting. OK? We had to where it was like, “OK, here’s package A, B, C,” right? And if they were like, “A is the cheapest, right? C is the most expensive,” from a sales standpoint, where are we probably going to go on average, right? You’re going to go, right? So, what we really realized is let’s get some more flexibility and move into creating a sales process where Sean can actually design something for specifically what that client wants and needs.
Chad Pinther (22:24):
Most of the time they’re coming to us with the kind of inherent sort of belief that we—and hopefully that’s definitely the truth that they trust us—that we know what we’re talking about. We’re the experts. If they want to achieve A, then we’re going to give them the plan to get there, right? And so rather than just being restricted to specific plans, Sean can create very custom things, like, “Alright, so if you want some group membership, a group membership plan, but you also want to do one or two times a week for some PT, right? Let’s get you into that. Do you want open gym access?” Right? “Do you want nutrition?” OK. And so, he can build all those things together, and we’ve sat down and put together the pricing structure of all that. So, he’s got his prescriptive sheet, and he goes, “Here’s what you want.”
Chad Pinther (23:20):
“Here’s your goals. Here’s what I recommend.” Right? So then from there, he has that ability to build that hybrid sort of membership, which then boosts most of the time the average membership. But the main thing is it’s actually getting these members what they truly want, rather than just going: Group PT, that’s your only option here, right? So that’s been huge for delivering our mission, which is to truly help people live their best lives and help the larger community, right? So, that prescriptive model has really changed things for feeling like we’re achieving that, as well as helped from a financial standpoint because people will genuinely spend more if they feel like they’re getting what they really want.
Mike Warkentin (24:18):
Yeah. Listeners, the prescriptive model, I’m going to give you the high level—it’s more intricate than this—but I’ll give you the high-level details of how it works. It’s not a shotgun blast of “Here’s everything we offer.” It is listening to a client, asking what they want to accomplish and then prescribing exactly what would get them to their goal fastest. For example, “I need you to come to group classes four times a week, one personal training session a week, and you’re going to do nutrition with Esther monthly.” That can be your entire prescription, and that package probably sounds like $400 or $500, and people will buy that. If they don’t, it’s as simple as saying, “OK, you know, that’s the best plan, but I can also get you there with, maybe we take out the personal training for now, and we go with this package,” and there’s a whole system. In the hands of an experienced sales rep like Sean, which Chad has at his gym, this can be a super powerful thing. And the best part about it is what he just said: You’re actually helping clients achieve their goals by telling how you can get them there fastest. That’s it. There’s nothing else there. It’s not high pressure. It’s not mean; it’s not slimy. It’s just saying, “Here’s how I would get you to the goal.” So, have you seen like marked improvements in average revenue per member and gross revenue as a result of this whole thing?
Chad Pinther (25:25):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yep. We’ve seen—from the beginning, our numbers are—we’ve seen a three and a half times increase since we started.
Mike Warkentin (25:37):
With Two-Brain?
Chad Pinther (25:38):
Correct.
Mike Warkentin (25:39):
Three and a half times revenue?
Chad Pinther (25:41):
Correct.
Mike Warkentin (25:42):
Wow. So that’s—you’re on the leaderboard, and you’ve increased gross revenue three and a half times since you started with mentorship.
Chad Pinther (25:49):
Yep. Yep. From when we bought the gym to now currently. Yeah.
Mike Warkentin (25:53):
That’s life changing—that’s a life changing stat, right?
Chad Pinther (25:56):
Oh, absolutely. Like we talked a year ago—the net owner benefit, it’s allowed us to definitely live a good life for ourselves, to be able to put money away. We’ve got some real estate investment as well. And we have three full-time career coaches that we’re able to provide great income to some benefits, right? And then we’ve got Sean who’s a full-time as well. So, a team of four. We opt for a smaller team rather than doing a bunch of part-timers so we can get them really dialed in and bought in, and they can actually feel secure that they’ve got a career in this, something that they love to do. So being able to have all of that to support my wife and I when—you know, we’ve got a daughter, and she does tons of activities and all that; we can pay for all of that. Take a vacation a year, and each of our staff members can do what they want to do and be well taken care of as well.
Mike Warkentin (27:02):
Wow. So that’s really cool. The cool thing here is you’re not doing this with 600 members. I know there are some gyms on that leaderboard that have quite a few members, like I think there’s one that has about 500, I know for sure. And that’s cool. You are doing it a different way with a high ARM, a great length of engagement, great sales process, and like 220 to 240 members, I think you said. So, under 250, which is a sustainable number, right? Which means that you don’t have to have—like, you have a big space at 9,000 square feet. And I know rent in Denver isn’t cheap, but you’re not doing it with 16,000 or 20,000. You’re doing it with a decent sized space. And I think if I am—if I would be so bold, I think that you have some room to grow even, when your nutrition program—if I have you back in a year, I bet your wife’s nutrition program is going to be doing more than $2,000 a month simply because she’s walking the walk; she’s in the gym. She’s obviously skilled at what she does.
Mike Warkentin (27:49):
I would guarantee that thing is going to be up a bunch of money, and your gross revenue’s going to go up. So, you’ve got a whole bunch of cool stuff in place. I’ve got to ask you this. So, gym owners out there, and they’re nowhere near your level and just starting out and they say, “What would I do if I wanted to add about $2,000 to my monthly revenue?” What would you give them as a first step? What should they do?
Chad Pinther (28:09):
Yeah, I think the first thing that I would do is I would definitely move to a prescriptive model or have some form of that in your sales process, rather than just focusing on if you just have group personal training, one or the other. See if you can get a process involved that is more about giving a client exactly what they want and do what Lisa has taught me, which is good, better, best. Right? Which is a way that you can have people—who doesn’t want the best, right? So, from a sales standpoint and from accurately being able to give a client what they want; give them these three options, right? So, I think moving that prescriptive model; I think that really doing a great job of dialing in your onboarding process to have mandatory PT would be an excellent way. We’ve just discovered that creating that one-on-one relationship with your member is—it’s just invaluable.
Chad Pinther (29:19):
And then by having that added PT revenue, you’re now not only creating better movers, safer movers within your gym, but you’re creating a relationship that already starts off that, “Hey, there’s value in PT,” right? And so, we’ve seen several people say, “Hey, OK, I did that PT in the beginning, but I’d like to go and do another session or continue doing this,” right? And so, I think having that built into your process, if you can, would be a huge benefit to your gym in general, but would also benefit your bottom line right out of the gate. So doing that; I think having some sort of nutrition program would be—like I think it’s interesting that you asked the $2,000 because that’s exactly the number that Esther’s bringing in right now to the gym. And I expect—we expect that to go higher as you said, especially since we’re spending a lot of time, I think Coop calls it, “putting them on the podium” where we’re actually putting the spotlight on people who are achieving things.
Chad Pinther (30:29):
We’ve got this little whiteboard that people take a picture of in their goal reviews, and it shows their muscle mass. You know, the InBody scan is a direct part of when you come into the gym and every single goal review in our gym; you get that InBody scan. Gives them a metric of saying, “Hey, here, you’re actually achieving this,” or if we’re not, “Let’s figure out why.” And it’s also a good point where we can work with them on encouraging them to do some nutrition work as well, right? So that, I think, bringing nutrition in, because we all know it is the foundation to health, right? It’s before all of this movement. And we still struggle with this. We get people who still think, “I can outwork a really poor diet.”
Chad Pinther (31:25):
We know that that’s not, so I think if you can get this going in your gym, there’s tons of resources from Two-Brain, the program’s built out there. One of the things we did is we switched out a mentorship session with Cynthia Fotti. So, she’s one of the specialists; we have worked with her a couple different times, and she basically will be like, “OK, here’s how you do it. Do A, B, C, D.” And we’ve executed that and always had some great bottom line revenue for that. So, I’d say a nutrition program would be essential to that. And that’s going to increase your bottom line. And then, I’d consider paid advertising. OK? I don’t think it should be first. We cover all the bases with retention with our CSM, doing a risk report every week—who’s not coming to the gym—making sure that we take care of our members with their goal reviews, et cetera, having a lot of really cool events that are free for them to participate in.
Chad Pinther (32:35):
Working on that community and working on affinity marketing as well, where we get referrals from other people. But I think paid advertising can be really helpful and really powerful to foray into. It can be expensive, right? Like to a bottom line. But if you do the numbers—and we have—we’ve absolutely recovered by three, four times what we’ve invested in it when it comes to things like putting in the high-ticket items. That’s another thing I think you could do. We don’t get a ton of them, but when we do, they’re big, right? So that more than pays for the paid advertising. So, I’d say those are the main aspects.
Chad Pinther (33:25):
And finally, if you can afford it—I know not everybody’s in that same position, but we’ve had great luck with it—the sales director thing is a great thing to have because when you have somebody who that’s what they live and breathe, right, they’re going to do a better job than you. I remember when we first hired Sean, and I was like, “OK, I’m going to sit in on his thing, and I’m going to watch what’s going on just to make sure everything’s going right.” And it only took me a few sessions just to sit there and say, “Why didn’t I do this a long time ago?” Number one, and you’ve got to be careful. You don’t want slimy salesperson, right? So, we had like 70 applicants for our sales position, right? So, wading through all that, and we had—it’s a pretty cool story because I’m wading through all these applicants and I’m walking by in our athlete sort of like common entryway area up there.
Chad Pinther (34:30):
And there was a guy standing there, and I noticed he—I’m like, “This guy’s not a part of the gym.” And I walked by him, and I said, “Hey, are you new?” He goes, “Hi, I am Sean. I’m your sales director.”
Mike Warkentin (34:44):
Powerful play.
Chad Pinther (34:44):
And I was like, “OK.” So, we sat down and talked, and he has a way of talking with people and making him feel great.
Mike Warkentin (34:52):
He sold you, right?
Chad Pinther (34:53:
Yeah, he really did. And so, when I sat in on his sessions, I’m like, “This guy’s much better. He makes you feel comfortable.” Yeah. So, you know, be careful about that. But I think if you can find someone, you know, like him, and you can have someone like that to give you your time back. We talk a lot about it this in our mentorship about buying our time back, right? And the whole thing is getting the right people in the right seats, and they should be better than you at what you’re doing. And my wife and I and our coaches were doing it; we were doing OK, but we weren’t really salespeople. It wasn’t what we were passionate about. And so, when we handed that over to somebody who is, it made all the difference.
Mike Warkentin (35:35):
OK, so Chad listed a bunch of stuff there that you can use to generate more revenue in your gym. What should you do? Well, I’ll tell you this. A mentor would tell you exactly what to do when, what is the best thing for your business right now. It might be a sales director; it might not. It might be a CSM; it might not. You will figure that out with a mentor and everything that Chad listed, we have plug and play resources for clients: checklists, step-by-step resources, timelines, done for you stuff where you just take the stuff, and you put it in place really fast. You can get a nutrition program going in about a week, I would think, if you did it with a mentor. But I’m going to give you this for free. The prescriptive model: I’m going to put a link in the show notes for you.
Mike Warkentin (36:12):
This—you can literally take this, read this article; it’ll take you maybe 10 minutes. You could put this in play today in your next sales consultation. And if you do this, I’ll give you a couple of stats. People are going to stay longer and buy more. And as part of the prescriptive model, we have goal review sessions. In those goal review sessions, 90 days down the line, 30% of clients upgrade their service packages by 30%. Those are stats from deep in the Two-Brain vault. That means that you’re going to sell more stuff to people in your business and add more revenue without adding a single member. Just by asking them, “How are you doing in progressing towards your goals?” You can do that very easily. Chad is living proof of that. I’m going to put the link in the show notes. Do me a favor, read it, use it, and then use that money book a call to talk about mentorship and see what we can do to help you move even faster. Chad, I want to thank you so much for your time. I love circling back and finding out what you’ve done over the last year. So, we’ve got to make a date, March 2025, and do this again, I think.
Chad Pinther (37:12):
Yeah, I appreciate your time. Such an honor, Mike. Thank you so much.
Mike Warkentin (37:16):
My pleasure. We will talk to you very soon. Thank you again for sharing your time. I’m Mike Warkentin. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Please hit “Subscribe” on your way out, so you don’t miss an episode. And now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.
Chris Cooper (37:27):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today.
The post Exactly How They Drove Gym Revenue Up 3.5X appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
April 3, 2024
Exactly What to Say to Get PT Sign-Ups
I’m going to give you a few million-dollar sales lines today.
And I don’t mean “line” like you’re duping someone into buying garbage.
I mean simple sentences that have been used in my gym and many others to generate millions of dollars in PT revenue while helping clients make progress toward goals.
Why Is PT Essential in Gyms?
First, a review:
And this one deserves its own bullet:
PT is a no brainer. You should offer it.
Existing Clients
When you do Goal Review Sessions with your current clients, you must measure their progress toward their goals. That measurement frames the conversation.
From there, you ask if the client is satisfied or wants to speed up progress. If the client feels the need for speed, here’s your line:
“The best way for you to speed up your progress is to add a one-on-one session with me every month, where I give you a little extra homework.”
The response will be one of two things:
1. The client will ask for a price and add it to the monthly bill. (That’s a big win: Your average revenue per member just jumped.)
2. The client will ask for the price and say “I can’t do that right now.” You just say, “No problem. You’re still going to make progress with the current plan. Let’s meet again in three months and review your progress.” (This is laying the groundwork for a future win: The client now knows where the accelerator is, and they can stomp it at any time.)
Here’s a stat: In Two-Brain gyms, 30 percent of clients who do Goal Review sessions upgrade service packages by about 30 percent. That works out to about a 9 percent increase in gross monthly revenue.
Use this approach with current clients. I can’t think of a better way to improve your top-line revenue without adding more members.
New Clients
John Franklin, a former gym owner who is now our chief marketing officer, told me the line I’m about to give you made him a million dollars when he was running a fitness business.
With new clients, you should bring them into your business with a free consultation followed by a one-on-one on-ramp. Retention data shows this is the best way to keep clients longer. It also adds front-end revenue and exposes the new client to high-quality one-on-one coaching.
We teach clients exactly how to do these free consultations so they convert at high rates. The short version: Find out what the person’s goal is, take a measurement so you know where the person is starting, then provide a prescription to take the person from the starting point to the goal. That prescription should include a one-on-one on-ramp and something like this:
“If you want to be ready for that race in four months, I recommend training three times a week, doing a mix of strength-and-conditioning work.”
Then you say this:
“Would you be more comfortable doing these workouts in a small-group setting or one-on-one with me?”
Back in the day, many gym owners who focused on group coaching just assumed that’s what everyone wanted. They were wrong.
Many clients don’t want to work out in a group at all. In fact, in my gym, 25-30 percent of clients want the one-on-one option after the on-ramp.
The question can be reused after 90 days in Goal Review Sessions: “We’re making amazing progress here. Would you like to try group or would you like to continue one on one with me?”
About 30 percent of people will want to continue PT with you indefinitely. In my case, about 10 precent of clients only do PT—but the value of each client is 2.5X that of a group client.
Use These Lines!
These lines work. They’ve worked for me, and they’ve worked in gyms all over the world.
Start using them today as part of a goal-review/free-consultation system at your gym. (Two-Brain clients get checklists, step-by-step instructions and done-for-you resources to get these systems in place at very high speed.)
If you follow my advice, your revenue will go up.
And if you want to learn more about scaling PT, my new guide is now out.
To get “How to Add $10K in PT Without Adding a Single Member,” head to the Gym Owners United group and send me a DM!
The post Exactly What to Say to Get PT Sign-Ups appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
April 2, 2024
Don’t Scale PT With Groups—Do This Instead!
Here’s a common mistake:
You start doing one-on-one training and then try to scale up by coaching large groups.
The math seems to make sense at the time:
If you make $60 an hour serving one client, you could make $96 an hour if you serve 12 clients who all pay $8 for a group session.
In reality, people who follow this path almost always end up with one 12-person class at noon or 5 p.m. and a bunch of two-person sessions in which they lose money.
Hard data in our annual “State of the Industry” report backs this up: Almost no gyms consistently run classes with 10 or more people.
I made the mistake of trying to scale a successful PT practice with big groups, and because many of my “group classes” had two people in them, I was essentially selling PT for $16 an hour. I had given myself a huge pay cut.
I didn’t go down this path alone.
Many gym owners came with me. Interestingly, a lot of CrossFit affiliate owners made the same mistake even though CrossFit creator Greg Glassman went from personal training to small groups, not gigantic groups in a huge warehouse.
So what’s the missing step? I’ll tell you—and it was obvious the whole time.
Small Groups, Big Revenue
When Glassman had too many clients and too few hours, he started pairing people up. Eventually, he had small groups of four people or so.
Here’s the right way to scale PT:
Partner people up in two-on-one sessions.Then coach three people in an hour.Add a fourth person as needed.In all these groups, deliver customized programs and huge amounts of attention so clients receive amazing value.
You can group people who complement and push each other in the same workout (“small-group training”) or people who have literally nothing in common and train independently (“semi-private training”). Both approaches work.
For example, I’m a member of a four-person semi-private group in which I do my cycling-focused program next to other people who are doing their customized programs.
I might deadlift and they might row or do high-intensity intervals with functional movements. But we all always get great coaching and benefit from the camaraderie in the gym as we pursue our own goals.
There are three keys to these sessions:
Everyone in the group receives more attention than they would in a large group. A skilled coach circulates and ensures clients get a lot of attention. It should feel more like a PT session than a large group class.Clients might get a small price break on the one-person PT rate—maybe 10 percent or something—but the real selling feature is the value: vastly increased direct attention. You don’t have to charge cheap rates for this valuable service.Trainers who lead these sessions can earn up to $80 an hour, which is a vast improvement over the $25 most gyms pay for group-class coaching.
These small-group/semi-private sessions are now the fastest growing segment of my business—which drives up my revenue and profit.
My coaches love leading the sessions because they can do great work, earn good money and create long-term careers.
And my clients love the sessions because they get better results faster.
Win-win-win.
Get My Guide
That’s how you scale up a PT business—essentially with more PT delivered to a small number of people by a skilled coach.
It seems obvious now, but it really isn’t—and it wasn’t a decade ago.
The lure of big group classes is still strong. But more and more Two-Brain gyms are adding lucrative small-group/semi-private streams that have a huge effect on their businesses (here’s one).
Want to learn more about scaling PT? My new guide is now out.
To get “How to Add $10K in PT Without Adding a Single Member,” head to the Gym Owners United group and send me a DM!
The post Don’t Scale PT With Groups—Do This Instead! appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
April 1, 2024
How to Add $10k in PT Without Adding a Single Member
Mike Warkentin (00:02):
How do you add $10,000 in personal training revenue without adding a single member to your gym? You are going to find out today because Chris Cooper, Two-Brain founder, is going to tell you. I’m Mike Warkentin; I’m your host. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Chris, are you ready to help gym owners add 10K in personal training revenue today?
Chris Cooper (00:19):
Absolutely. More than anything else, I’m just going to remove the barrier that’s stopping them from adding it.
Mike Warkentin (00:24):
We’re going to tell you exactly how to do that. Before we do, please hit “Subscribe.” We would love to see you every single episode to help you run a better gym. And Chris, I’m going to give you something right here. Just a quick story from our last leaderboard show. I talked to a gym owner in Denmark. Name is Rune Larson. He has a gym with huge monthly revenue. He told me his membership fees are very high in Denmark, for Denmark, but in the worldwide scheme, they’re not very high. This is where his group classes, he knows that, his personal training rates are about $140 an hour U.S.—way higher than the average in the U.S. And he’s crushing it in PT. He has lots of members, lots of group members, and tons and tons of PT, and I think you can give him the people, listeners, the secret as to how he’s doing it.
Chris Cooper (01:06):
Yeah, absolutely, man. You know, especially if you’re running a group training gym and especially a CrossFit gym, you’re getting a barrage of messages saying that personal training is not CrossFit. I think that’s garbage. I think that there’s always a place for one-on-one, and we’re going to get into exactly how to do that, why it’s important and how to add it. Even if you’re running a CrossFit gym that’s only ever done group classes, and we’re going to do all that today.
Mike Warkentin (01:30):
Let’s dig in. So, we’re going to talk about this first: We need the simple plan. How are you going to get your group members to do personal training? And the focus here: goal reviews. What are we doing here, and how can gym owners do this with their current members?
Chris Cooper (01:42):
Yeah, so what you want to do is make sure that every member in your gym, no matter what kind of gym you have, has a clear goal, a plan, and somebody to hold them to the plan. And what that means is that you should have asked them when they started, “What’s your goal?” so that you could help them. I identify how to get there, but even if you didn’t do that, even if they came in on a trial, or they just walked straight into group classes, you want to start checking in on them now. And that’s because you want to get ahead of the process where they start to quit your gym. So, you set up a goal review; you want to do this every three to six months, and you want to sit down with them for about 10 minutes and say, “Here’s your goal. Here’s your progress. Here’s your next best step.”
Chris Cooper (02:19):
So in practice, this would look like: Mike, you’re my client. You come in. “Hey Mike, it’s been 90 days since we last chatted. Let’s measure your progress.” So, we get you on the InBody, or we do whatever—some kind of measurement—and we’re measuring the thing that you care about. So, if you don’t care about your body composition, we don’t do the InBody. If you only care about your max clean, I say, “What’s your max clean?” Now we track that stuff. Then I say, “Are you happy with your progress?” And if you say yes, I say, “Congrats man. I’m so proud of you. I really would love to tell your story to inspire others.” I pull up my camera, and you give me a 30-second little “happy with my progress” talk. I get to tell your story. If you say, “You know what? I wish I was getting faster results, Chris.”
Chris Cooper (03:03):
I say, “OK, if I were in your shoes and I really wanted to speed up my progress, here’s what I would do.” Now that’s where the prescription comes in. And as a coach, I’m not prescribing personal training to everybody, but as a professional, I know, “Hey, look Mike, if you had a little bit more one-on-one attention once a week, I think there’s some extra stuff that we could do.” Or “Hey Mike, I think that if I wrote you a supplemental program to incorporate more zone two, give you some metabolic flexibility, help you burn more fat when you’re exercising, I think your progress would come a little bit faster. Are those interesting to you?” “Yes, they are.” “Here’s the price,” and that’s all it is. You’re basically being a professional and coaching people to the best possible answer for them. The highest-level athletes in the world have one-on-one coaching.
Chris Cooper (03:50):
They have a specific nutrition coach. They have a specific coach for the bobsled or the bike or even for CrossFit. You know, they don’t shy away from it. And the more elite an athlete becomes, the more they need that one-on-one. At the other end of the spectrum, there are people who are coming into your gym who want to do your CrossFit or your HIIT or your bootcamp or your kettlebell class. They don’t really want to try it out in front of strangers in a group setting. So, they might want one-on-one, and we’re going to come to exactly what to say to those people later.
Mike Warkentin (04:20):
This is the prescriptive model. Chris blitzed through it and gave you the details of it. I’m going to put a link in the show notes so that you can read exactly how this prescriptive model works, take notes and then implement this at your gym. But the short version is you ask clients what they want to accomplish, you tell them how you can make it happen. And that kind of seals the deal. It’s the “Help First” concept that if you see in the book behind me that Chris wrote about; I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. The idea here: You’re helping clients get what they want, and you should be compensated for that. So that’s the simple step. You could do this with your current clients, Chris, right? Like we said at the beginning, you don’t have to get new clients; you obviously can acquire new clients, but this works. Have you seen this in practice and in the mentorships or the gyms that you mentor? Have you seen this work really well when people do this with their current clients?
Chris Cooper (05:04):
Yeah, I mean, it saved my gym. I was running this personal training studio, and we’ll get into that story later. And basically, the money from personal training was paying for the CrossFit gym, and I didn’t realize the two should work together and that there’s a happy middle. But right now, the reason that a lot of gym owners don’t offer this to their clients is between their ears. Maybe they think, like, “I couldn’t afford this,” so they don’t want it. Or maybe they think like, “Well, they should be in the group. That’s what’s best for them.” But what you have to do is just pause for a second and say, “In a perfect world where money was not an object, time was not an object, scheduling was not an object, would this person get faster results one-on-one?” And if the answer is yes, then it is your duty to tell them that as their coach.
Mike Warkentin (05:50):
And I love the idea of hybrid memberships because it’s almost that dropdown. Like if you said to someone, “Hey, the best results are going to be 15 personal training sessions one-on-one with me a month; the price is $900.” People are, like, “Oh, not everyone can afford that.” That’s cool. What if you said to a group training member, “You’re paying $160 a month, but if you add in one $75 PT session a month, I can give you an hour o focus time that’s going to supercharge everything else that you do. Are you interested in that?” And a lot of people will say yes, and we’ve seen this in our gym, other mentorship clients; that changes their average revenue per member from 160 to 225 or whatever it is. And that’s life changing revenue and profit for these people. So that hybrid dropdown membership is a great option. Have you seen that work in our gyms as well?
Chris Cooper (06:33):
Yeah, many, some now offer it as the only option when you sign up at their gym. There’s a group training option and one-on-one, and you have to have one-on-one if you’re signing up for a group training option. You know, the way that we frame it in my gym is basically, like, “We want you to get to your goal as fast as possible. The fastest possible way is the direct and focused attention of a coach one-on-one. The budget option is to do it in a group class, which will still get you there. We have our CrossFit groups are extremely effective. You’re just not going to get there quite as fast. But if that’s what you prefer, no problem.” In our gyms though, what we typically see with Two-Brain gyms is that when they come in, if they’re not offering a one-on-one option, this usually bumps their revenue up like 15 to 20% right away.
Chris Cooper (07:23):
And so, one of the very first things that we teach is how to add that one-on-one option and the thing that they would say is their favorite—yes, their revenue’s going up, their ARM is going up, their bottom line is improving—but what they would say is their favorite is this is a massive opportunity for my coaches to make more money. You know, and honestly like a guy that just applied to my gym, no word of a lie: This guy is from Brazil. He’s been working at different gyms in the city, trying to stay in Canada. And he applied to my gym because he said, “I follow Two-Brain, and I know that I can make a better living at a Two-Brain gym than anywhere else.”
Mike Warkentin (07:55):
And I can back that up with—I’ve talked to a number of gym owners and there was a thread in our private group going on the other day, talking about top paid staff members at gyms. And the numbers are like $80,000, $90,000, $100,000. And this is—like personal trainers used to make like 25 or 30, and that was the reality about 10 or 15 years ago is like the career did not exist because at some point 30 grand doesn’t cut it, and you’re out to be a real estate agent or whatever. That’s changing now. And so, this model is really helping trainers make a ton more money, and it really helps gyms make a ton more money, and it helps clients make much faster progress. Not every client is going to sign up for this if someone’s looking for a $10 a month access-only gym membership. That is not your client avatar for this model, but for other people who want results coaching in a microgym setting, this works really well. Our data and leaderboards always show that. So please follow along. We release those every single month, and Chris tells you what the Top 10 gyms are doing, and we release their quotes, exactly what they are doing at their gym.
Chris Cooper (08:52):
There’s one more thing here, and the key is really always: What do your clients want? And knowing you know how to provide that. And what you’ll find is that when you start asking the question that I’m going to share with you in a couple of moments, you’ll find that 10 to 15% of the people who walk through your door are attracted to your method. They want to do your kettlebell, your bar, your Pilates, your CrossFit. They don’t want to do it in a group. And if you don’t offer a one-on-one option for them, you’re basically excluding them.
Mike Warkentin (09:23):
There you go. Now this is an interesting one. At the original cross gym in Santa Cruz, California, Greg Glassman started training people one-on-one, and then he started training them in very small groups and then he scaled to larger groups and that became a worldwide empire with thousands and thousands of gyms around the world. But the interesting part about that is that people often think scaling PT now goes from personal training, one-on-one giant groups with tons of people and lots of revenue, but there’s a missing step, and nobody saw it for a very long time. What is it?
Chris Cooper (09:55):
It’s small-group training as we define it now or semi-private, you might call it. Which Greg did, which Greg did. You know, when Greg was talking about group training, just for context, his groups were like four to six, not 30. And you can hear them talking about this in the early articles on the journal. Along the way, CrossFit gyms got this idea that CrossFit equals group training and that was never Greg’s model. And of course, you know that model is great for CrossFit HQ because it means more affiliates, more Level 1 certifications. It’s great for the people on the L1 staff because they get to do more L1 gigs. It’s not the best model for CrossFit gyms. And this applies to strength and conditioning gyms. And I think—you know, I’ll share my story of how it almost bankrupted me by thinking that the big group model was like the CrossFit model.
Mike Warkentin (10:46):
Yeah, I didn’t—I was in the same boat, and I did not realize that you could teach CrossFit in a group—a one-on-one setting. And that’s just—like the hundreds of thousands of dollars I left on the table over the last 15 years is real. So, tell me, what is the—how do we scale? What do we do?
Chris Cooper (11:02):
So if I was doing it again, so Chris Cooper 2008: I’ve got a personal training studio. We’re doing everything one-on-one; I decide I can’t keep doing a 13-hour day anymore where I’m doing one-on-one session after session, selling my time. How do I scale? We find CrossFit; the pictures on the website at that time were fairly big groups, maybe 11 or 12, and so I opened up a CrossFit gym, and I thought, “This is how I scale. I go from one-on-one to group.” We tried it out with a group of 12. It was fun as hell to coach. I had the time of my life; it was so great. I turned to Mike Watson and said, “This is all I want to do for the rest of my life.” And he was like, “This is amazing.” And not even a year later, that CrossFit gym had almost bankrupted me.
Chris Cooper (11:44):
The only thing that was keeping our business alive and food on my table was the personal training studio, which I just—I had two leases, and what I realized was that people in the personal training studio were still doing CrossFit. I was doing the same workouts with them as I was doing in the group classes. And then I’d go up to the CrossFit gym at night and coach two or three people in this class or even eight or nine. And I still was losing money. Yeah. It wasn’t a class. And I’m like, “What is going on here?” And that’s when I learned that there’s a difference between the method of CrossFit and the model of group training, and they’re not necessarily the same thing. So had I known this back then, what I would’ve done—and what Greg was doing, but I didn’t see it, and I don’t think anybody was asking him these questions—was partnering people up.
Chris Cooper (12:33):
And what he told me later, and you can listen to this interview; you can hear him say it in his own words if you go to twobrainbusiness.com/greg. What he actually did was, he would say, “Mike, you’re my client. You’re doing great. You’re making all this progress. In fact, the only way that I could think to have you make progress a little bit faster is to have you work out with a training partner. Now I’ve got Sam over here who has the same goals as you. He’s not quite as fit, but I think if the two of you worked out together that you would both make results more quickly. Do you want to try it? We’ll do a session. If you hate it, we’ll go back to one-on-one.”
Mike Warkentin (13:10):
What have I got to lose?
Chris Cooper (13:11):
Yeah, I mean it’s a reasonable expectation, right? He didn’t say, “This is going to cost you less” or anything like that. Not right away. And so, they tried it, and they loved it, and you became friends with Sam, and Sam became friends with you, and suddenly it’s like you’ve got this accountability partner; you’ve got somebody to race. And Greg was doing this with like the world jiu-jitsu champion—I think, Garth—and he had a really high-level cyclist, and he started writing about the compounding effect of people training together. And then eventually, he became three and then four. And then, at the time, when he had four people training together, he had to move out of that facility and find his own place in whatever it was called, Research Park or something. And that’s basically what group training was, was “OK while these four people, they come in and basically do personal training together.” Now there are some gym owners who are super-duper smart. They saw this; they figured it out. Daniel Purington, Brian Bott, and they started doing semi-private or small group training. I didn’t. And I tried to jump from one-on-one to big group. It killed me because I was charging big group prices, right? Eight, 10 bucks per visit for personal training. I was only getting two, three people in these classes. So now my revenue for that class is 24 bucks. That doesn’t even cover the lights, you know?
Mike Warkentin (14:26):
Yeah. And your hourly rate was probably like 60 or whatever it was.
Chris Cooper (14:29):
For personal training, it was. Yeah. I mean, it was crazy. Like I could do three hours of personal training and go home, or I could work for nine hours a day in the CrossFit gym across town and make the same revenue with higher expenses. So yeah, if I had it to do over again, I would scale exactly as Greg did. I mean he was brilliant about that. He just didn’t share it with everybody. So, partner people up, look for complementary pairs. It’s not always going to work out, but some—most of the time it will, and scale up that way. And there is a little bit of a discount that goes on; so in my gym, if you’re training one-on-one, it’s a certain price point. You know, 75 bucks an hour. If you’re training two-on-one, the price actually drops down to like 67 an hour or something like that.
Chris Cooper (15:16):
So you’re saving about 10%, but you’re gaining way more value. It’s 50% better to train with a partner. And what’s really interesting there is that after we started implementing semi-private training, this is all my coaches want to do now because they’ve gone from, “OK, I can earn $32 an hour” to “Now I can earn $80.” And so, when a new client comes in, they want them in semi-private. So, this is—it’s kind of the middle ground between personal training and the big group training that we were offering. But it’s the fastest growing segment of my business right now. And a lot of Two-Brain gyms are going in this direction.
Mike Warkentin (15:50):
And with semi-private training, these clients don’t have to do the same workouts that are modified for this person and that person, right? Like they can literally do their own programming streams where I think you told me you go in and do deadlifts, and Sally over there is doing whatever it is for her goals, and you’re still having that same atmosphere. You’re still high fiving, you’re still shooting the crap between sets and so forth. Your coach is motivating you; you’re getting high fives and cheers. That whole atmosphere is there, but you are working on what you want to work on. She’s working on what she wants to work on, and the coach is giving you about 80% of the personal training attention you would get. One-on-one, same thing with her. Everybody’s getting a price break, the coaches are making more, the business is making more. It kind of sounds like a perfect model, does it not?
Chris Cooper (16:28):
Yeah man, I mean—so I’m a fan as an owner because it’s higher revenue, higher margin, better service for the clients. But I’m a fan as a client too. So, I have a program that comes from my cycling coach. I go over there at 11 o’clock today. So, 90 minutes from now, there’ll be four of us in my group. One is coming back after a prolonged bout; her husband unfortunately passed away from Alzheimer’s. One just had a baby, and she’s getting back into it. One has like five kids, and she needs the schedule, right? So, I know them; they know me. I don’t have to talk about the weather with the coach because she is carrying on four conversations at a time. My coach—I have cleans and deadlifts today. My coach is like the Canadian national champion for weightlifting for age group. I’m going to get amazing coaching out of her. So is everybody. There’s a little bit of small talk in between, like, “Hey Lauren, what did your kids do this weekend?” You know, but it’s my favorite now. I like it better than one-on-one as a client even. And I know the coach loves it too because she’s getting paid double what she normally would.
Mike Warkentin (17:32):
I hate it as a trainer, and I would’ve hated, as a client, doing a 500-meter warmup row with someone counting my meters—a coach like, “OK, you’re almost there. We’re almost ready to do some dynamic stretching.” I’m like, “Just leave me alone. I’ll finish the row, and we’ll get back when I need some coaching on muscle ups,” right? So that—I get what you’re saying. There are some major benefits because sometimes you don’t want to hover over someone the entire time as a trainer, and sometimes an athlete doesn’t want that either. But anyway, so this is a cool progression, right? It’s a great progression that no one saw, right? Or very few people saw and then a few of gym owners put it together. And now we have this really cool program that serves so well in between one-on-one and group. So, we said at the beginning of the show: $10,000 in revenue without adding any members.
Mike Warkentin (18:13):
We’ve talked about exactly how you can do that with these goal review sessions. You’re meeting with your clients, you’re giving them these options and you’re getting some to sign up for personal training. So, Chris, I want you to tell me—this is the big money thing right here with the $10,000—how—we’re going to do two topics: Second, we’re going to go with new clients or prospective clients. How do you get them to sign up for personal training? But first, because we said without adding a member, what do you say exactly word for word to get these people in goal review sessions to sign up for personal training?
Chris Cooper (18:40):
Yeah, so if I imagine myself in the chair at the desk, you’re sitting in front of me, you are my client, and we look at your InBody results, or I look at your performance results—maybe you came in and you said, “I want to bring my deadlift up to 400.” Or maybe you came in and you said, “I want to drop 10 pounds.” The first thing is we’re going to measure: How are you doing? So, I might pull up Wodify or PushPress or be on the whiteboard. I might look at your previous result on the deadlift, I might put you on the InBody. So that’s our baseline. We’re framing the conversation and I’m going to say, “OK Mike, you’re making some progress. You know, you’re down 3% body fat; your total weight is down 3.5 pounds. Are you completely satisfied with your progress?” And if you say, “Oh boy, I’d really like to speed it up.” I’d say, “Great. In your shoes, I would want to speed it up too. The best way for you to speed up your progress is to add a one-on-one session with me every month where I will give you a little bit of extra homework.”
Mike Warkentin (19:39):
That is the line, gym owners; you should definitely write that down, and you can repeat it word for word, and you don’t even have to give Chris credit. You can take that one for free. How does that conversation, Chris—when you’ve had this conversation, because I know we’ve done it recently.
Chris Cooper (19:52):
Hundreds of times. Yeah.
Mike Warkentin (19:53):
So, what happens? What’s the response?
Chris Cooper (19:54):
One of two things. They’ll say, “OK, how much does that cost?” And I’ll say, “It’s an extra 70, I can just add it to your membership, and we can start next Monday.” And they’ll say, like, “Sounds great. I’m in.” Sometimes they’ll say, “Great, I’ll try it for three months.” Wonderful, let’s go. Because I know it’s going to get them better results. The other option is they say, “OK, how much is it?” And I say, “It’s another 70 on your membership.” And they say, “I can’t afford it.” And I say, “No problem. Keep doing what you’re doing; you’re going to get there. We’ll meet again in 90 days and measure your progress again.” That’s it.
Mike Warkentin (20:29):
And I have talked to gym owners on our leaderboard that when they do that, and the one gym owner was very clever about this, he started doing this stuff with newer clients, goal review sessions with new clients, because it’s harder to change behavior with existing clients. So, he started with new clients and then when all of his old clients are like, “Ah, goal reviews; I don’t need them.” When they started seeing the results that the new clients were getting, they were all like banging on his door and saying, “Hey, can I do a goal review session?” He said, “Yes, you can.” And he sold them more stuff that they wanted and saw value in, and he made way more money—like it happens like that. So, tell—that’s a great way to segue. Oh go ahead.
Chris Cooper (21:03):
No, the actual numbers—I’m just looking at our averages now. Across Two-Brain, about 30% of people who do goal reviews wind up upgrading their service to increase the speed of results, and they upgrade by about 30%. So, all told, what that means is that if you do a goal review process on your gym, you can increase your revenue by about 9% up top line, which is—it would be very hard for me to find another way to increase your top line revenue by 9% without adding any more members.
Mike Warkentin (21:34):
If you try right now, set a goal, gym owners: 10 goal review sessions with current clients. Do that in the next week; push yourself to do it. About three of them on average should sign up for additional stuff, and they might sign up for about 30% more stuff. Try that, track it. If you’re struggling with it, and your numbers aren’t good, you’re doing something wrong. Repeat the exact line that Chris said and then start tracking it and keep going. But this has been proven to work. This is not stuff Chris is making up. This is data from hundreds and hundreds of gyms around the world who are using this process. Now this is the other one: new clients. What would you say to a new client to present personal training? Because I had no idea how to do this. I run group classes. What do you say?
Chris Cooper (22:11):
I think this is—I came up with this because I’m an introvert, I think. But so, basically, we go through our NSI process, which we teach in the mentorship program. It’s just—you’re just asking questions. You never ever feel like a salesperson because I would never have wanted to. And so, you ask them their goals, you measure their starting point, you make your prescription and your prescription might be three workouts a week; it might be four or whatever. And then you say, “Would you be more comfortable doing those workouts in a small group setting or one-on-one with me?”
Mike Warkentin (22:43):
There it is.
Chris Cooper (22:44):
John Franklin claims that line made him a million dollars. And it’s—I wouldn’t say it’s a line like a pickup line; it’s just being curious and asking, “Would you be more comfortable doing this in a small group setting, or would you be more comfortable doing it one-on-one with me?” And in our gym, about 25 to 30% now would say, “I’m more comfortable doing it one-on-one with you.” In fact, we don’t even present the group option a lot of the time; it’s always private or semi-private. But historically, over the last 20 years of owning this gym, about 30% of people would say, “I’m more comfortable doing it one-on-one with you.” And what’s interesting is that you stay one-on-one with them for the first 90 days. And then you ask them that question again, and you say, “We’re making amazing progress here. Would you like to try group, or would you like to continue one-on-one with me?” And about 30% of those people will say, “I want to continue with you forever one-on-one.” And that’s why historically about 10% of our clients were always personal training clients, but the value, what they paid, was two and a half times the average group client per month.
Mike Warkentin (23:48):
If you start using this line with new clients, prospective clients in onboarding—or sorry in No Sweat Intros or free consultations—some of them are going to want personal training, and you are going to make more money. We’ve seen this happen: John Franklin, million dollars. That’s probably a low estimate for some gyms—other gyms, different numbers. But the idea is if—you know, I’ll give you my story. Like one second, I just said, “OK, group classes start Monday at 9 a.m.,” and they signed up, and that was great, but it was $150 a month, right? If I had said, “Do you want to do this one-on-one with me or in a group?” and someone said, “One-on-one,” that got—all of a sudden that’s like a $700 monthly package or something like that, which would’ve changed my life at the time and changed my whole trajectory as a gym owner. So, remember that line guys. Chris, you’ve done even better. You have a new guide coming out, and it is coming out tomorrow. How to add $10,000 in PT revenue without adding a single client. How can people get it? Where do they go? What do they do?
Chris Cooper (24:41):
They go to gymownersunited.com, and you’ll see a post there where I’m offering the guide for free, and then you just send me a DM on Facebook to get it. DM on Facebook because Facebook limits the number of friends that I can have. I’m always bumping up against that 5,000-thousand-person cap. That’s not, as my kids would call it, a flex. That’s just the reality of the algorithm, right? It’s so, it’s best if you send me a DM, and then I can give you the PDF guide, and you can just use it and go make more money. You know? And in fact, I know a lot of people get these guides, they love them, they’re beautiful, they’re like collectors of them, but I want you to go try this stuff. I’ll tell you this: People who come into our mentorship program, sometimes they don’t want to add personal training.
Chris Cooper (25:28):
They just believe like, “No, I sell CrossFit,” “I sell spin,” “I sell …” whatever group training program there is. “I don’t want to add personal training.” Like Fit Body Boot Camp, F45, this is really common. And we say, “Just be curious enough to ask the client,” and every single time, 10 times out of 10, they say, “Hey, I asked the client if they’d be more comfortable doing this one-on-one. And yeah, you were right. Three out of 10 said yes.” And they suddenly realize that they’ve been shoving 30% of their audience away. People who wanted to sign up but didn’t want to try it or barf in front of a group like we all did with CrossFit, right?
Mike Warkentin (26:05):
That’s where you’re going to get that guide. And if you want to go even further, Two-Brain clients actually get all these resources and more with plug and play scripts, roleplaying with a mentor, practicing coaching, standard operating procedures, marketing materials, the whole deal. It’s all just pushed in front of you. And your mentor will say, “Use this now, use this now, use this now and use this next.” It’s step-by-step coaching. And the mentor will also come back and say, “Did you do that thing? Did you say that line that Chris said in your last No Sweat Intro or free consultation?” Goal, plan, accountability to hold you to the plan. That’s where the clients can go even further. So, if you want to add speed, mentorship is the answer there. Chris, are you ready tomorrow morning for a flood of DMs in the Gym Owners United group?
Chris Cooper (26:47):
I sure am. Yeah. I get tied to my phone every third Tuesday when we do this. But I love it because it feels—my favorite thing in the world is giving people presents, and I get to feel like we’re giving people presents. Just remember that just as a lot of your clients will want one-on-one because they’re buying speed, getting business coaching is the same thing. When you buy business coaching, you’re buying speed, and the more individualized that attention is, the faster you’re going to go. And that’s why Two-Brain is a one-on-one mentorship practice.
Mike Warkentin (27:17):
You want to talk about that. There’s a link in the show notes, book a call and you can find out exactly how we can help you. Chris, thanks for your time. I’ll let you get ready for DM-City tomorrow morning. Get her done. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin, and please hit “Subscribe” on the way out. But don’t forget to get that guide tomorrow morning.
The post How to Add $10k in PT Without Adding a Single Member appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
The Simple Plan: Getting Group Members to Do PT
It’s possible to add a huge amount of personal-training revenue to a gym—even a gym that focuses on group training.
And you can boost your gross by five figures without adding a single member.
I know this because I did it—and it saved my gym.
The best part?
It’s not hard to do.
Goal Review Sessions
You should know your members’ goals—what they want to accomplish in your gym.
Ideally, you asked them during a free consultation before they were clients, and you’ve tracked their progress ever since they joined the gym. You should review these goals in 10- or 15-minute meetings every three to six months.
If you don’t know clients’ specific goals right now, you can backfill—but you must start the process now by booking Goal Review Sessions.
In a goal review, the process is simple: You review the goal, you review progress toward the goal, and you lay out the next steps to make additional progress.
As fitness coaches, we can agree that in many cases—not all, but most—personal attention will produce swifter progress.
Would a client get better at double-unders with three minutes of attention in a group class once every two weeks or with an hour of focused instruction every week?
The answer is obvious.
So if a client wants to make faster progress toward a goal, suggest adding personal training. Then ask if that plan sounds good. If the answer is “yes,” present the price.
That’s it.
It’s not twisting arms and pushing people to purchase services they don’t want. It’s being a professional and coaching people to find the plan that will help them get results at the desired pace.
Barriers to PT
Many gym owners who specialize in group training can’t sell PT because of their mindset.
When you’ve focused on marketing “unlimited classes for $170” for five years, it’s hard to get your head around a 10-session PT package at $700 or more.
Here’s the thing: You are not your client, and you shouldn’t put yourself in their place. Clients have their own budgets, priorities and desires. Your job is not to tell them what they can and can’t afford.
It’s literally your duty as a coach to tell a client how to get the best results in the shortest amount of time.
Scenario from another industry: A client’s tire is always leaking, and you, the tire expert, know it’s time for a new tire. But instead of saying that, you worry about the client’s budget and say this: “Just make sure you always have about 10 minutes to pump up the tire before you drive anywhere.”
That’s ridiculous, right?
Same deal in the gym: “Want to learn Olympic lifting? The fastest path is working one on one with me. Too expensive? I get it. Our hybrid package includes group coaching and one PT session a month. That’s not it, either? No problem. I can help you in our group classes. But if you ever want to hit ‘turbo boost’ and move faster, we can connect one on one.”
Here’s a stat for you: When gym owners who don’t offer PT join our mentorship program and get PT services in place, they usually see a revenue jump of 15-20 percent right away. One of the first things we teach is how to add that one-on-one option (and we have a huge pile of plug-and-play resources for clients).
Is the additional revenue good for the gym? Of course.
But offering PT also helps gym owners help their coaches make a better living.
And it helps their clients reach their goals faster.
It’s a win in every column.
Big News
My new guide comes out tomorrow.
I’ll tell you exactly how you can get “How to Add $10K in PT Without Adding a Single Member.”
To make sure you don’t miss this free resource, be sure to join our private group Gym Owners United.
The post The Simple Plan: Getting Group Members to Do PT appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
March 29, 2024
Stressed After the Open? Two Tips for 2025
So you got through the Open in 2024—congrats!
Now here are two business questions:
Did you generate any revenue with the Open?
Are you and your coaches feeling fresh and eager right now even after three weeks of extra work?
I hope you answered “yes” to both questions. But if you didn’t, let’s take a few steps today to make 2025 easier.
1. Create an After-Action Report (AAR)
When I ran the Open, I was frantic. In the chaos, I often thought, “I should do this differently next year.” But instead of writing a note down, I just judged another workout, handed a tearful athlete a roll of toilet paper and high-fived a happy athlete.
Take 30 minutes right now to put some bullet points under two simple headings: “Do This in 2025” and “Never Do This Again.”
Here are two examples of stuff I put on my after-action report when I finally started taking steps to get ahead:
Do this: “Before each workout, tell all competitors when scores are due and when they will be validated. Remind each person that you will not respond to special requests to validate scores on demand.”
Never do this again: “Enter Open season without buying backup toner for the printer.”
Little stuff like this is so obvious in the moment, but if you don’t log it, you’ll run up against all the same frustrations year after year.
Create this report today and make a calendar note to review it in December 2024.
2. Get Our 2024 “Intramural Open Guide”
Every year, we produce a playbook to help gym owners reduce stress and generate revenue in the Open.
If you didn’t get our 2024 edition before the Open, get it now and file it away. Put a note in your calendar to review it in early December. Then draw up a few plans so you’re well ahead of the game when the Open rolls around in 2025.
We’ll produce a 2025 guide with an exact timeline and updated calendar, but the core principles of the Intramural Open won’t change.
So if you review the 2024 guide in December, you can do stuff like this:
Tell staff that you have a plan to reduce stress in 2025.Tell members you’re ramping up the fun in 2025 with an exciting new plan.Lay the groundwork required to generate revenue from the Open in 2025.
In the gym business, if you aren’t planning three to six months ahead, you’re behind.
Plan Ahead!
It’s tempting to wash your hands of past events and move on.
But if you do a few simple things right now, you’ll have a much better experience in 2025.
Take a few minutes right now to fill out a short AAR and request our “Intramural Open Guide” so you can thrive next year!
The post Stressed After the Open? Two Tips for 2025 appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
March 28, 2024
$80,000+ in Monthly Revenue: How Does Titans Sports Academy Do It?
Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Big gross revenue in gyms. What’s the secret? You’re going to find out today. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. My guest today, he’s going to open the vault and tell you how he earned a spot on our top 10 leaderboard for gross revenue in January 2024. Chance Beam, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Chance Beam (00:21):
Absolutely, thanks. I’m excited to be here, and thanks for having me.
Mike Warkentin (00:24):
I can’t wait to talk about it. So, you’ve got a whole bunch of stuff going on. Titans Sports Academy in Kennesaw, Georgia is just one thing, but your operation pulls in upwards of 80 grand per month gross. And you’ve got all sorts of other stuff going on. So, we’re going to dig in and talk about these numbers and see if we can help gym owners. Are you ready to go?
Chance Beam (00:43):
Absolutely, happy to.
Mike Warkentin (00:44):
Alright, so let’s start here. Give me a breakdown—any percentages or numbers you’re willing to throw at me just for revenue streams in your gym. Like what goes into this number that’s bigger than 80 grand?
Chance Beam (00:56):
Alright, and so one of the things I like to really think about is—and so in kind of preparing for this call and thinking about it—is that our revenue streams are membership: We have lessons, which is private lessons, which would be considered PT in the gym world. We have camps, which would be considered kind of like the youth camps. I know some people are doing that in the summer. We have apparel sales. Then we also have some upsells for like showcases, which kind of falls under that camp scenario. And so those are probably our five or six revenue streams. And like myself and most gym owners, you’re going to have different peaks and valleys of those revenue streams throughout the year—and trying to figure out a way to manage those. I think one of the … I probably have on my side, other than others, is I have time.
Chance Beam (01:42):
And so what I mean by that is that, so Titans Sports Academy or Titans started back in 2003. They started this full-time-full-time in 2008, 2009 under another organization—broke off on my own in 2013. So, the biggest difference I probably have from most is I’ve now been doing this 10, 11 years under Titans Sports Academy. So, I can go back and look at 10 years of financials to kind of get an idea of, “Hey, these are the things that are doing well. These are the things that are not doing well.” So, for us, our membership, like most people, is kind of what puts me to sleep at night, lets me know that I can pay the bills. So, our membership has grown, and we’ve done a lot of things over the time to really focus on that. One of the things that coming through Two-Brain—that has been vital during COVID and after COVID is kind of stripping away the emotion of a lot of things.
Chance Beam (02:32):
So for example, length of engagement is huge for us. I talked with you briefly about that yesterday, but length of engagement. So for us, our membership percentage—out of 800,000-900,000, right at close to a million, we may be showing—is going to be right at about 25 to 28% of that total number. So, you’re looking at about 250 to 280, 2 90, somewhere in that ballpark as far as the total number of memberships. And then from that—well, we’re very different, being a baseball academy—that may not apply to some of your other gyms is we’ll have about 40% of our stuff is apparel sales, uniforms, “mom and dad need a hat, “Jenny down the street has a cheerleading event.” So, we ventured into some other things that still fall under our gym. But also, my thing is, like last night I was at our gym kind of preparing for this call, and I made it a concerted effort to see how many people had our logo on. And I would argue that … percent of our people are having our logo on, and that includes parents that are bringing the kids. And so that’s something I’m kind of proud of. Or like when you pull out of a stoplight and you see somebody have like the little magnet that has your …, that’s still kind of cool to me. But you know, that’s something that we really kind of focused on is really treating our logo and anywhere that we can have that as another opportunity to market to expose people to what we’re doing.
Mike Warkentin (03:55):
OK. So that was—if I break it down again, that’s about 25% is memberships, you said about 40% is apparel sales and then the remainder is going to be camps and other things of that nature. Is that correct?
Chance Beam (04:06):
That’s correct. So that’s going to be your college showcases, your camps, your clinics, group classes, things of that nature—all of those kind of bundled into that category. Also, for us it’s a little different, like cage rentals and some other things. But you may have certain people that have big enough space, and I know I’ve talked to a lot of gym owners, and they may have a space in the back; they rent it to a cheer group because they have some turf area or a batting cage or something like that. So that would kind of fall into that category as well.
Mike Warkentin (04:35):
So you’ve covered a little bit of it, but I’ll ask you again for the 60-second summary. Like what is a sports training academy with a focus on baseball? What are you selling there? What are you doing? And give me some—chuck at me some space size, some sizes and some staff numbers too, if you have them.
Chance Beam (04:49):
Yes. So, for example, so I tell people that my elevator pitch, if you will, is we train athletes, boys and girls. We want them to be champions in the game and in the game of life. And so, our core principles are accountability, responsibility, attitude, effort and integrity. And we talk about those on the daily. And I tell people all the time, that’s what we hire on. That’s what we fire on. That’s how we grow. That’s how we decide to contract all of those things. So, when I tell someone that, for example, I followed traction very closely in an EOS book and start how we build our business. You know, I tell—they ask you for your guarantee in that book. And I say my word is my bond. If I tell you that I’m going to do that, you can bet your bottom dollar on that. Because of that, that’s given us—
Chance Beam (05:39):
And so they say, “Well, what makes you different?” We’ve done it for 20 years, and if I’ve done it for 20 years, that tells me my word has to be good for something. So, a framework of who we are: We do baseball training and softball training from eight to 18. We have roughly 40 teams. Organizationally, we have about 440-some odd members. Staff wise, I’ve really segmented it down to—probably we have six full-time staff, not including myself. So, what we’ve done using kind of the Two-Brain model of each of those staff members have somewhere between 80 to about 130 players/members under them. With, in my mind, knowing that in an optimal world, I’d love to get each of those people to about 150, right? That’s where—that’s kind of a max number, but that’s also where they can be the most profitable.
Chance Beam (06:30):
They can go deep inside that group for additional group lessons, camps, clinics and things of that nature. And so, that’s kind of how I’ve started to segment my business. One of my full-time staff members is my apparel guy that runs our store, which is, again, very unique. But under that, I’ve got—under Titans Sports Academy, we have baseball and softball, so we have Titans Baseball, we have Wahoo—we have Wahoos, which is another brand of baseball. We have Southeast Socks, which is another brand and the Stars Fastpitch brand. So, Titans Sports Academy kind of becomes an umbrella, and under there you have four different brands.
Mike Warkentin (07:06):
OK. And what kind of space are we running—are we talking about here?
Chance Beam (07:09):
So, space-wise, I would tell each and everybody, the biggest, scariest part of this whole business is your space. It can kill you. It could be a blessing or a curse. So, when it’s 2013, I had my—rented a space, just like most people watching this, and I had a larger space because with baseball you need a larger space inside. And I think we had roughly about 11,000 square feet inside. We had a great rental deal, but I was doing the math, and I can carry a one and if inflation happened, and it was basically—I was going to have to raise rates just to pay rent. And I was like, “Man, what a terrible world.” So, I had started looking with a long, like a four- or five-year window. I’ve got to have my own space.
Chance Beam (07:50):
I’ve got to be able to secure my overhead into perpetuity. So, if I raise rates, I’m paying off things or paying myself more. I’m not just paying rent. So, I say all this to say that I—our current space that we have is 16,000 square feet inside. It’s a two-story brick building where when we bought it, we got a great deal on it. We put a second floor in it so that we could have that entire second floor be open. So, it’s a 90 by 90 brick building. So, 8,101st floor, 8,102nd floor. Then we also just in December expanded to an outdoor space with about another 5,000 square feet. And then we also have a mid-sized baseball field behind us. It’s a turf infield, grass outfield.
Mike Warkentin (08:33):
OK. So, you’ve got a big operation. That’s pretty cool. Have you—what’s the highest level you’ve ever put a player into? Have you seen anybody go into the MLB?
Chance Beam (08:41):
Yeah. No, we got seven guys in the big leagues right now.
Mike Warkentin (08:43):
Oh, care to drop a name, or two?
Chance Beam (08:45):
Yeah, so for example, one of my guys is Nathaniel Lowe just won the World Series last year, Texas Rangers first baseman. He played for me. So, one of my favorite memories—and bear with me for a second. This past year—so Nathaniel’s playing first base with the Rangers; they had a former player of mine named Alex Speas, he’s a first rounder. He comes out of high school, and he’s like 97 to 99. He could throw the ball forward very hard. He had no idea where it was going. Fast forward, he’s had Tommy John, all these kinds of crazy things, and so now he’s like 20, 23, 24. I talked to him in December just over a year ago, and he was in North Carolina doing some baseball stuff. I was like, “Man, are you sure you’re done?” He is like, “Yeah coach, I think I’m done. I’m just going to start coaching.”
Chance Beam (09:25):
I was like, “You only get one shot at this.” So fast forward to last June, in January, a scout had showed up. One of the guys I talked to was like, “You’ve got to …” so he had him throw a bullpen. He was still 95, 97 at 23, 24. He hadn’t thrown for almost a year. He gets him to come to spring training; he starts to figure out he can throw strikes. He makes his big-league debut in the middle of last summer. So, I say all this to say this: So, when he makes his big league debut, I got a picture of Nathaniel Lowe, Alex Speas, who both played for me; his agent is a guy named Spencer Kebo who also played for me. So, I got three guys, two of them in the big leagues, and his agent all played for me, former players. So, it was a pretty cool moment.
Mike Warkentin (10:06):
What a cool story. That—I love it. I love hearing about stuff like that. I was looking forward to talking to you because I knew you’d have somebody in the MLB that I could put a face to a name. So, that’s pretty cool. Talk to me a little bit about—so you got some interesting stuff going on. I’m going to get into this one right now because I know it’s a bit of a different one. Talk to me about the apparel thing. So, some gyms just sell a few T-shirts on the side. Other gyms I know of sell a lot of equip—apparel, like some of these destination locations like Las Vegas, Hawaii. You’ve got an entire apparel empire going. It actually generates more revenue than your basic memberships. What’s going on?
Chance Beam (10:38):
Yeah, I say that Titans many times is the great accident, and many of the things that we’ve been—that we’ve failed at and that we’ve been successful at, I think I was like, “Don’t be afraid of either one of those because when you start them, you never know if they’re going to be a success or failure.” But our apparel business literally started out of the frustration of us having teams and mom would come to me, and mom or dad would be like, “Hey, I’d love to have a hat,” or “Hey, I’d love to have a T-shirt,” and that kind of thing. And so, it was kind of the experimentation process where I brought another third-party company in like many of our people do. And “Alright, well I’m going to have them do it.” And the problem was that I would have someone else doing the apparel, say uniform or spirit wear.
Chance Beam (11:18):
They would do it wrong or wouldn’t deliver on it. And then I would get yelled at for something that—and I was like, “This is crazy. I’m getting yelled at. These are my customers, and I’m not making any money off of it, so I’ve got to really start to rethink this.” So, when I was a kid—I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, so we’re in the South—so, when I was a kid, we would go to Myrtle Beach, or we would go to these Redneck Riviera places: Myrtle Beach or Panama City Beach. And you would go to these stores, and you would see—alright, I’m a youth large at the time, and I would look at these walls, and they would have like 50 different logos, and it may have been airbrushed or whatever, but it was like the heat-press type of thing.
Chance Beam (11:56):
And they would have all these logos. You were like, “I want this shirt with number 27.” And they would dig back there and put it on there. And I can remember this as a kid, and it was like that really thick, heavy vinyl that made you sweat when you put it on. It was terrible. And so, I had this epiphany and so I started calling around to little people and going like, “You’re not—there’s got to be a way to do that.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s come a long way. It’s basically called screen print transfers.” And so that’s kind of how it started where there’s just got to be a better way. And because I had a guy that was doing it, and we were trying to do a revenue share, and he would order all the stuff and get it printed. I felt terrible for him. They would sit—maybe it was the wrong size, maybe the logo the people didn’t like or whatever. And I was like, “There’s just got to be a better way.” So, all of that to say that we just kind of kept experimenting, kept experimenting. And now it’s become a huge part of our business where I’ve got a full-time employee and some part-time people that help him as well. So, it’s kind of taken on a life of its own.
Mike Warkentin (12:50):
OK. So many gym owners aren’t going to be able to get into the idea of large-scale apparel manufacturing and printing. But the concept that you’re laying out here is super important. Chris Cooper has talked about this forever. It’s figuring out how you can solve more problems for your clients and obviously for your business at the same time. So, you saw, “Look, this apparel is just not coming out right. I’ve had the same problem. It’s always printed wrong. Everything’s wrong and backwards. The sizes are wrong. I get flack for someone else’s mistakes.” You are running with teams and sports teams who constantly need tons and tons of stuff, so you looked at that and said, “How can I solve more problems for my clients?” And now it’s creating 40% of your gross. So, if you’re listening out there and you’re not into apparel manufacturing, that’s fine. But think about: Are there other problems that I can solve for my clients? And if you find the right ones and solve them properly, you might be able to tack on some revenue. I love it. That’s an incredible story. What’d you got for me?
Chance Beam (13:40):
I want to add to this. And so, I think that most people, especially when I’m thinking like when I first started or other—they look at your apparel or maybe people having your logo as an expense or a headache. You’ve got to flip that thought to: That is advertising and marketing. So as I said earlier, one of the things that we still do is—and when I first started doing this, I couldn’t afford it, I’ll be honest with you, but those little magnets that you give to all your clients and then I went through a phase where “I’m going to charge them for” or whatever; no, give those things away. And so, the reason why I say that is to say this: So, if you’re, say, a microgym and you’ve got 50 members, you’ve got 80, 90 members, the more times than I can get my logo on their back, and they’re out in public, or maybe they’re at another gym working out—say for example, I used to be a CrossFit member, and now I’m somewhere else and I’m wearing somebody else’s logo—those things start to embed in people’s heads.
Chance Beam (14:31):
So instead of looking at it as an expense, looking at as—almost put it under a category of a marketing advertisement opportunity. And so, and I think I—if you want me to, I could share kind of how I can take my model and decelerate it down to honestly about 500 to a thousand dollars. You could do this at any gym.
Mike Warkentin (14:51):
Really? What’s the short version of that? Like how could someone do that?
Chance Beam (14:54):
So, the short version of this is that somebody somewhere in your gym has a mom or dad—probably a mom—they have a heat press somewhere in their house that they’re not using. Yeah. Alright. And you can get on Facebook Marketplace, and you can buy a cheap heat press for 200-300 bucks at most, whatever.
Chance Beam (15:10):
Now, we have a really nice one because we have a lot more stuff, but it doesn’t have to be really nice. Get a cheap heat press. From there, you want to get your logo, and I’m sure they’ve got it digitized. And what I would do if I was in your little world, ask your clients—I think if affinity marketing’s a great place—but ask your clients, “Hey guys, I want to offer you guys a T-shirt, and we have an event coming up,” or “We’ve got the Open,” or “We’ve got intramurals,” or whatever and, “If you can design me the best T-shirt or the coolest t-shirt—we’re going to take five and then we’re going to vote for them—and if you win that, I’ll give you a free T-shirt.” It’s kind of a free way to have them kind of do your marketing for you or just do a basic T-shirt.
Chance Beam (15:48):
So what I would do is I would do that little exercise. So, I’ve got one design here, and then I’m going to have my basic Titan Sports Academy. I’m now going to—I’ve got my cheap heat press and then I’m going to go to SanMar, SNS—there’s tons of cheap T-shirt places online. Your customers know—the Two-Brain people, they know the most comfortable, cheapest T-shirt is 2, 3, 4 bucks. Go to a place called Transfer Express, and I can take that logo, and I can literally upload just any kind of digital file in there, and it’ll digitize it and do it for me for free. And then, based off the number of those logos that I order, the price comes down. So, for example, if I order 12 of—it starts to get a little technical, but you can read between the lines.
Chance Beam (16:33):
So for example, in our world, in gym world, they’re going to want something that’s kind of stretchy—on a T-shirt that’s going to be moving; think about working out. So, it’s called elasta-print, but without getting too technical, if you did 12 of those, those prints would cost you—we’ll call it a two-color, three-color—it’s going to cost you $10 or $11. Now if you order 24 of those, it’s going to come down incrementally and so on. So, I have two logos I put out. One that I’m doing a pre-order for: Our “CrossFit helps me look better naked” T-shirt. And then the other one is my Titans Sports Academy T-shirt. OK. Or Titans CrossFit, whatever you want to call it. And so, I do the pre-order and maybe I do a couple for my coaches, so now it brings those costs down.
Chance Beam (17:16):
So, say I order that and then I order my Titans Sports Academy, but now I have those logos in hand, and I add—you know, buy a couple T-shirts, the ones that are pre-ordered and size run—or you know, most of your gyms are going to know women’s medium, women’s adult large, your basic sizes that you know. Order a couple of those. So now all in. I may have 500 or 600 bucks. Now, I sell out those T-shirts and if I pay for what I just bought this first time, well I’m even, so now I have 30 or 40 people running around with my logo on it. Well, that’s a win. And now, the next time I already had—so each time I do this I could do it a little better. So now I have my Titans CrossFit T-shirt per se; I have that logo.
Chance Beam (17:59):
So a new member comes in; I want to give them a T-shirt, or a new coach comes in, or you know, and it’s those type of things. So, my point of it is: You don’t have to do it at the scale I’m doing, but that’s the basic concept that we started with of doing something really, really small and easy. And the other thing that I would say is that there’s a lot of tremendous companies, and I kind of think it’s Forever Fierce. They do great T-shirts, and they work with you guys. So, it’s not a knock at them or any of the companies that are doing it, but what I found with our clients is that the faster I can get a T-shirt in their hand, the happier they are, and they’re willing to spend an extra—let’s face it: No offense, nobody’s going to wear our T-shirts for 12 years.
Chance Beam (18:38):
OK? If I can get them to wear them for 12 times, that’s golden. So, I’m not trying to get—I don’t need the Maserati of T-shirts; I just need something that’s going to hold up seven or eight times. And if they pay 20 bucks and they throw it away after the seven or eight times, it’s great. So, I think a lot of people get so caught up in, “Oh it’s got to be this, or it’s got to”—stop. Get them a T-shirt, have it feel comfortable, have it say something cool or something that they identify with, and it’d be comfortable and quick are the two …
Mike Warkentin (19:06):
So the principle there that you’ve just laid out, if you’re listening: return on investment. You think about your time, and you think about your money. Could you make more money if you invest in a heat press? Do the math; figure it out. And if the answer is yes, maybe invest. If the answer is no—like for me, it’s not because I’m bad at retailing; that’s me. If you’re like that, don’t invest there. But if you’re good at it, chance is you might want to go that route. So that’s an interesting way to generate some additional revenue. Tell me about, in your gross revenue scheme, there’s a lot of things that go into that—a lot of different metrics. So gross revenue is this big number at the peak of the pyramid. What else do you focus on below that? Like what is your main focus? Is it length of engagement, average revenue per member? Where are you focusing on other metrics?
Chance Beam (19:47):
So for us, length of engagement is a huge one. So, for example, if we’re right now at about 19 months, 20 months for length of engagement, which is huge. So that means that almost 50% of our people are staying almost two years. If I can get that number to go to 26, 27, that means that a large portion of our people are teetering on being with us for three years. So, to my point of what I just talked about: How many t-shirts can I sell them in three years? How many hats? How many lessons, clinics? All of those things start—so that number starts to really snowball. Whereas, now I’m not spending nearly as much money as having to rebuild my client base. And then by—and then also if somebody’s with you for 18 months or eight days, there’s a different level of engagement with that client.
Chance Beam (20:42):
Meaning, so for example, last night we were looking at trying to pivot some of the things we were doing. I talked three times with three different people that I knew or thought were pretty good fans of us, and I said, “Hey, here’s some things we’re talking about. I’d love to have your input.” And each of them, they were—at the end of those conversations they said, “Thanks for asking.” It was just that kind of thing of them feeling like they were part of it. And I was like, “I don’t know if we’re going to do this or not. Just some hair brain idea I have, and what do you think of it?” And they were like, “Yeah, that’s really cool, but you know, more than anything, thanks for asking.” Whether I do it or not, I had five minutes that I kind of earned some equity with them.
Chance Beam (21:16):
And so, but length of engagement is a huge one for us. And then with that same client, how many times can I service their need? So, their need may be private lessons. So, in the—it could be a PT, and I know they’re doing nutrition. We don’t do nutrition; it’s not great for kids, but you know, or a T-shirt or hat, and then there’s college showcases as they get older. So, trying to find different checkpoints that your clients are needing and servicing that need and having that available. So, when they get to that checkpoint, you’re already there, so you’re kind of having to stay ahead of them. So, I’m constantly—I tell people—so this morning, I spent like 30 minutes going through a pro forma of between now and the end of our fiscal year. Our fiscal year is July 31st. And I tell people if I’ve messed up, and I’m worried about today, then we’re toast. I’ve got to be three, six months in advance to figure out what’s coming next because if I’m not there, then you’re going to miss some huge opportunities.
Mike Warkentin (22:17):
OK, so that’s a really interesting one. Gross revenue is very strongly tied to length of engagement and average revenue per member. Those are force multipliers and really great things that build up that huge revenue number, and gym owners out there, if you’re not quite at this level, think about this one: Selling one T-shirt every quarter is going to boost your average revenue per member by $20 to $40—whatever you price that T-shirt at. Not per month obviously, but you’ll break it down if you do it per quarter. But you could also sell one personal training session to a client per month. And this is just what Chance was talking about: servicing your client’s needs. “You are not doing very well at double unders. I can’t help you more in this class, but in a one-on-one session, I can get you double unders. Would you book a session with me?” $75: Your average revenue per member goes up by that much. So, you can really look at those concepts, and they work really well. Chance, have you had any big bumps where—really rocket ship moments—where your average or your gross revenue went up where it was like, “Wow, that was a huge, huge thing for us.”
Chance Beam (23:14):
I would tell you COVID, oddly enough. COVID for us was just incredible. So, I would say before COVID and after COVID, we doubled, and people would—and one of the things is that we do have a private facility. In my world, everybody’s using local rec parks and those types of things. And so, the rec parks were closed because of COVID. We’re a private facility; we could stay open. In Georgia, we were only really closed down for about 30 days. But going deeper, I would tell you the main reason that I think that we doubled in size was not because of what I just said; it was because during that time, my competitors all sat on their hands, and they did nothing. Meaning when COVID hit, they just stayed quiet. They didn’t say anything; they didn’t do anything. There was no activity on social media. There was no outreach.
Chance Beam (24:03):
I had talked to my personnel, and at that time we had four full-time employees. And I met with my board, and I had an emergency meeting. I was like, “All hands on deck. We’ve got to meet, we got—” And so basically, I said, “Here’s the deal, guys. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can keep you employed, and I can pay your payroll for 60 days. I’ve got a 60-day window.” Talk about a tough conversation. And I was like, “So here’s the deal. For 60 days, I can keep you employed, but if we’re going to keep you employed, I’m going to need your help. And every day, we’ve got to try to add value somehow. I don’t know how we’re going to do that.” So, we sat for like three hours, and we just started brainstorming like, “Alright, kids are at home.”
Chance Beam (24:41):
“How do we help them at home? What can we do?” And so, what we came up with was our game plan was, during that time, every person on our staff had to come up with a video of a skill or something they could work on at home. So for example, we taught them how to throw long toss by yourself, take a baseball, put a sock on your arm, put duct tape around it, throw the ball; it stays in there so you could throw by yourself or drill work that you could throw balls off a wall and little baseball type of drills. Or in the CrossFit world, it would be like, “How do I get better at handstand pushups when I could barely do a pushup?” Right? And again, you guys have experts on these kinds of things.
Chance Beam (25:20):
Every day, we did a video and then every day at three o’clock, we did what we called “PE Live.” So, it was like a kids’ version; they’re stuck at home. We would do it on Instagram. We would go live, and I would have my daughter; I would invite another kid from the program in. And my local CrossFit actually gave us free programming to—they said, “Hey, we’ll program this for you, but if you’ll give us a plug.” And so, every day, I’d give CrossFit—I’d give it to them and give them their plug. “Now and out of Woodstock, Georgia, CrossFit Garage.” So, they programmed us a workout that we would be able to do that way with no weight, so kids could do it at home. So, we would go live, and we would do that. And then we also did individual programming for every kid in the program.
Chance Beam (26:03):
I mean, we basically filled up our day with just programming. And because of that, I think in retrospect, we kept the main thing the main thing when everybody else got really quiet. And the main thing in our world and everybody’s world is: Your clients are first. They have to be the focus of what you’re doing. If you’re making it about your managers or your GMs or your—somebody’s initiatives, you are going to lose. And then looking back, the biggest thing that it taught me is that we have to think about our customer experience. We have to think about: What are their struggles? What are they going through? And if we can meet those needs, they’re going to be our biggest fans, and they’re going to be customers and stay with us much longer.
Mike Warkentin (26:43):
Gym owners, I will summarize that for you; that is a relentless commitment to creatively solving your client’s problems in a forward-thinking manner. You’re not sitting on your hands; you’re asking: How can I solve more problems in the future? And how can I get more creative with what I’m offering to make more revenue? So again, if you’re not selling baseball programming or apparel, take that principle from it. How can I solve my clients’ problems? How can I make the client experience better? If you start doing that, you’re going to generate more revenue. And Chance, I’m going to put you on the spot here. A gym owner out there is at a different level, and they’re saying, “How would I start to add just $2,000 to my gross revenue?” What would you tell that gym owner to do just to put that little bump in there and take a little bit more home to their family?
Chance Beam (27:23):
This is something that we don’t do, but something that I know from afar, being in Two-Brain: One of the things that I’ve seen that Ashley Haun out of Florida and that I’ve heard Coop talk about is the avatar. Going after those 50-year-old clients. I think that’s ingenious because that’s an entire client segment that has probably been exposed to CrossFit. They want to feel good about themself, but in their mind, “I’m 55. There’s no way I could do CrossFit. I’ll die. I’ll break my neck,” right? And then, I think going after those clients and having a softer appeal as to—I think that would be huge because that’s a separate client base than what the normal CrossFit is. So, for us, one of the things that I’m doing is I’m focusing on kids who are seven to nine, which again, totally different cross set.
Chance Beam (28:13):
But here’s my thought process: If I can get the kid who’s seven to nine—or a gym owner who goes after the summer program or the youth program—if I go after seven- to nine-year-olds and I get two of those, let’s think about that for a second. If I get two kids who are seven to nine years old who sometime another join our team. Well, if they stay with me for three years or even if they stay with me the current year, two years: Holy cow, that’s a windfall. Even though maybe that particular program didn’t make a lot of money, it broke even, or it paid me enough to pay for its coaches. I’ve got those two clients that then stay with me for two years. That’s a no brainer.
Chance Beam (28:51):
And I think many times that’s a hard number to calculate as a business owner because everybody’s looking—I need it now. I need it now. We have to take a very long-term horizon of playing—constant battle of playing the infinite game and the finite game. And so, making those decisions in your mind, “I want my business to be here in 50 years.” Well, making decisions based off of 50 years is very different than being here in five months. And so, that would be my biggest advice there. You know, trying to look at those clients who can become potential clients who you’re servicing the need, and in their mind, they don’t think that they’re either ready or able to do it and going after that group.
Mike Warkentin (29:27):
So gym owners, I will give you a summary of that and a shortcut. Use affinity marketing, set up, say, a six- or eight-week specialty program for either kids or for older adults. And then talk to your current members and say, “Do you have a kid, or do you know a kid who could benefit from this program?” “Do you have an older parent or an older adult in your life who could benefit from this?” I bet you could fill those programs and use it as a starting point to generate some revenue, front-end revenue, right on the spot. And then consider, could we get these people to continue? Maybe with a renewable program that keeps going or even just with a membership. We actually—at our Summit, we’ll be having people teach you exactly how to start Legends programs and work with older adults.
Mike Warkentin (30:05):
So, this is a huge market. We already know kids’ programs. We had Jeff and Mikki Martin from Brand X Show up last year at the Summit. We know kids’ programs work really well. So, if you’re looking to add some revenue, try a specialty program, and use your current clients and see if you can get some of them in there. Chance, thank you so much for all this. This is hugely insightful. I’ve been looking forward to talking to you for a couple of years now, and I finally got you on the show. Thanks so much for opening up your books and telling us your secrets.
Chance Beam (30:27):
Absolutely. No, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Excited. Hopefully what we talked about today can help some people. It’d be great.
Mike Warkentin (30:33):
I think you definitely will. If you could help me hit some more dingers and slow pitch, I’d appreciate that too. Too many strikers for this guy. My name is Mike Warkentin, and this is “Run a Profitable Gym.” That was Chance Beam, one of our revenue leaders for January 2024. Please hit “Subscribe” on your way out. And now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.
Chris Cooper (30:51):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you, have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today.
The post $80,000+ in Monthly Revenue: How Does Titans Sports Academy Do It? appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
March 27, 2024
Gym With $30,000 a Month in Apparel Sales? Yes!
Chance Beam takes in more than $80,000 per month at Titans Sports Academy, and he earned a spot on our Top 10 leaderboard for gross revenue in January 2024.
Apparel production and sales account for about 40 percent of Chance’s total. The rest comes from memberships and various other training services.
You might not be interested in acquiring the skill and equipment you need to produce apparel on a large scale, but you can learn a lot from Chance’s approach to business.
Solve Problems for Clients
Titans Sports Academy is a youth baseball training facility in Georgia. Chance has been in the game a long time, and you’ll see some of his former trainees in the Major Leagues—Texas Rangers first baseman and World Series champ Nathaniel Lowe is one of them.
Anyone who’s been around sports teams knows they drive apparel sales. Uniforms, warm-up and practice gear, spirit wear, logoed hats and T-shirts for parents—it’s a big business.
Early on, Chance realized lots of parents were asking for this stuff. So he decided to solve their problems with a third-party apparel producer.
If you’ve ever dealt with local manufacturers and printers, you probably have a story that involves a late order or misprinted gear. Chance had similar issues and wasn’t interested in repeatedly taking the blame for someone else’s mistakes.
“There’s just got to be a better way,” he thought.
Chance recalled visiting Myrtle Beach shops as a youth and selecting graphics for customized gear that was printed on demand, so he did some research on screen-print transfers.
Then he purchased a heat press and started producing his own gear.
Now he’s got a full-time employee managing the process with part-time help, and apparel is bringing in more revenue than general training memberships.
You’re a gym owner, and you probably aren’t going to get into the large-scale T-shirt production business.
But apparel sales aren’t the important part of this story.
Here’s what Chance actually did: He solved problems for his clients and was rewarded financially for doing so.
Deliver Greater Value
Chance’s story isn’t unique. Two-Brain gym owners have found all sorts of ways to solve problems for clients, increase value, and drive up average revenue per member (ARM) and gross revenue.
A few examples:
Creating “hybrid” group-plus-PT memberships so clients can get focused, one-on-one attention once a month (or more).Running kids classes at the same time as adult classes so busy parents can save an hour by working out while kids train.Creating four-person semi-private groups where clients pay premium rates—but not one-on-one PT rates—for customized programs and increased attention.Working out a system where the car shop next door picks up vehicles from the gym lot for oil changes while clients work out.
If you want to generate more revenue, you might not need more clients. You might just need to figure out how you can serve your current clients better.
Tactical Tip of the Day—Ask some of your best clients this question: “What’s your greatest challenge outside my gym?”
Write down their answers, then ask yourself this question:
“Can I solve these problems for my clients?”
If you can, you’re going to make people happy and generate more revenue.
The post Gym With $30,000 a Month in Apparel Sales? Yes! appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
March 26, 2024
The Info I Craved as a Struggling Gym Owner
Twelve years ago, I would have crawled over a mile of gravel to get access to the info I’ll give you today.
I was a struggling fitness entrepreneur, and I would have loved tips from the best gym owners in the world. Back then, sound advice was hard to find, and you never knew if someone was offering data-backed facts or untested opinions.
Here, you’ll get quotes from the gym owners who posted these verified monthly revenue numbers in January 2024:
It takes $58,000 in monthly revenue just to get in the conversation here.
And over $125,000 in one month? That’s mind blowing.
So how did these gyms post these numbers? Here are the answers (note the focus on business fundamentals, not wild schemes):
“Increasing average revenue per member by offering specialty courses and also a higher-level nutrition program. We use goal reviews to upgrade prescriptions.”
“I think our revenue is high compared to most due to the amount of PT that we do. All our group memberships are hybrid, and we have recurring PT memberships.”
“We have been focusing hard on retention and goal-setting sessions. And two months into the year we are doing very well.”
“In March, we are beginning PT memberships as opposed to packages. More to come on the revenue impact of this in the coming months. We project that it will add around $7,000 to $10,000 to our revenue line when the grace period ends in six months.”
“We charge a lot—our ARM is between $700 and $800 (personal training and nutrition coaching combined).”
“We track leading KPIs for staff (sessions booked in advance, conversations initiated each week by our salesperson, client touch points for our client success manager). Everyone has a target number they are held accountable to—a number we know correlates to lagging KPIs like sessions and revenue.”
“We are selling quite a lot of PT, and we have nearly 500 members. Membership fee is only $108 USD but our PT session price is $130 per session.”
“We currently have 200-plus Goal Reviews in the calendar with people we meet every three months.”
“What was ‘special’ is that we hit a homerun on lead ads. We got 250 leads (normal-ish is 25), and we booked 80 No Sweat Intros (NSIs) that resulted in 55 sales. So we needed to hire an ‘NSI booker’ to keep up with the leads.”
“I have been in business longer than most. We focus on one aspect of the business at a time until it has the strength to carry itself, then we move to another revenue stream.”
“We are a baseball/softball facility, so we are based around teams. We focus on volume in numbers of memberships, but we are shifting to go deeper with our clients in 2024 to do more private/semi-private lessons this year and be more profitable.”
Revenue—and Profit
We teach gym owners how to generate the revenue they need to support their businesses and live the way they want.
That means we also teach gym owners to carve profit out of gross revenue.
Remember, huge revenue totals that equal huge expense totals aren’t impressive. We’ve seen “million-dollar gyms” with no profit.
But we’ve also seen gyms with 150 members that generate the profit required to pay the owner more than $100,000 a year.
To generate more revenue and profit, book a call here.
The post The Info I Craved as a Struggling Gym Owner appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
March 25, 2024
6-Figure Monthly Revenue? It’s Possible & Here’s How
Chris Cooper (00:02):
One hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue at a CrossFit gym. Imagine that. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and this is our monthly leaderboard show where I share not just the real numbers from Two-Brain gyms around the world, but also exactly how they did it so that you can do it too. We do this every month because I want you to have real knowledge from real sources. There are a lot of biz coaches out there, marketing agencies that will tell you numbers because they want to try and impress you and sell you, and it’s numbers that don’t matter. Like it might be: “We pumped 30 new people into this gym last month.” OK, but they all quit the next month. It might be that: “Hey, our new marketing system sold $80,000 in upfront, front-end revenue packages, blah, blah, blah.”
Chris Cooper (00:48):
OK, but that wasn’t sustainable, and it actually hurt the gym in the long run. Or: “We have pumped 150 new members into this CrossFit gym.” OK, well that gym is now an affilionaire, but they’re still not quite barely paying their rent. What we want to do is look at real numbers out there in the gym world and then tell you how these people achieve those numbers so that you can do it too. And that means cutting through all of the crap that you see on social media and getting real numbers reported from the 1,000 Two-Brain gyms worldwide and from our network of up to 15,000 gyms that appear in our data sample. So now, let’s talk about the Top 10 in revenue last month, and these are all equalized to US dollars because we want to be comparing apples to apples here and giving you real numbers—cutting through all the crap.
Chris Cooper (01:35):
So, let’s start with number 10. This gym is from the U.S. Super, super, super fired up to see them. They’re out on the East Coast. I got to hang with them at the Tinker Meetup down in San Diego, was it? Last month, or no—Austin, maybe. And just amazing people. Their revenue last month was $58,330. So now, let’s just screech, hold the brakes here for a second. This is a three-month revenue average. It’s not like they had one big dividend payment in January because they saved up their money all year in 2023 and then just paid themselves. We take a rolling average because we don’t want these like flash in the pan. “I offered a 30% paid in full discount,” or did some crazy thing that’s going to hurt them in the long term. We want people who are just doing this regularly and sharing the lessons from them.
Chris Cooper (02:21):
OK, so 10th place: $58,330 in revenue, U.S. Amazing. Number nine is also from the States, but they’re a personal training studio, and they did $61,145 in revenue in January. We’re going to get lessons from both of these. Number 10 was a CrossFit gym. Number nine was a personal training studio. We’re going to share lessons from both; I think that we can each learn from each other, and I’ll get to those in one moment. Eighth place was from Denmark, and their revenue in U.S. dollars was 67,745. This guy contributed a lot of knowledge and I’m really, really excited to share that with you in a moment. Seventh place: This is a health and fitness gym. $70,068 in revenue. That’s top line last month. And number six out of Pittsburgh, general fitness-type gym: $72,038. Now of course, these are all coaching gyms.
Chris Cooper (03:19):
At Two Brain, we work with coaching gyms. And so, what that means is that this revenue number is usually derived from 150 to 300 clients max. Amazing revenue numbers—so good to see it. Number five was from a CrossFit gym also: $76,400 U.S. I am way more impressed by that number than I am by any CrossFit affiliate, by the way, that has 400 members. Who cares? Like maybe they’ve got 400 people. That means that they’re going to have to be replacing about 35 members every single month just to stay even. And they’re probably charging a low rate, which means that the revenue isn’t nearly as good. So, when somebody says, “How strong is your CrossFit affiliate?” I say, “What’s your revenue, and what’s your profit?” I don’t turn to headcount. OK? Looking at headcount in a CrossFit gym is like measuring somebody’s fitness just on the basis of their bench press.
Chris Cooper (04:08):
That might be a component, but it’s certainly not the whole picture, and it’s not even the most important part. Number four: This gym was out of—I’m going to say Southern Europe. I’m not going to get more specific than that because they’re going to be on the podcast later on. And their revenue this month was $77,698 U.S. Again, especially in Europe right now, there’s this myth that big headcount equals a great gym. We need to look at revenue and profit if you really want to discern who’s running a great gym. This is especially true in CrossFit, and it’s especially true in like Western Europe right now. The myth pervades. And number three on the list: a Canadian gym. This is in U.S. dollars: $80,000 right on the nose last month. That’s awesome. Hopefully the owner sold a couple extra T-shirts to get over that hump. I don’t think it was even the first time that he’s been over that hump, but congratulations anyway.
Chris Cooper (05:01):
$80,000 in a month on average is a million dollar a year gym. Just put that into context, and this guy’s in Canada. He’s a great athlete. I love hanging out with him, and I’m hoping to cycle with him this summer. Above that, second place last month was a sports academy from the States, which was $82,205 U.S. Congratulations to them. Top line revenue. And our top revenue gym last month was a CrossFit gym. This doesn’t always happen. You don’t always see CrossFit gyms at the top for revenue, but it was last month. They’re from Switzerland, and they did $125,606 U.S. Congratulations to everybody. I’m really proud of you for proving that the model is successful. I’m really thankful to you for turning around and saying, “Here’s how other people can do it too.” So, we interviewed all of these top 10 gyms. We got their top tips, and I’m about to share them with you now.
Chris Cooper (05:55):
The first thing, to set the table here for the advice that I’m about to share with you—and I’m going to give you direct quotes from these leaders; these are not coming from me. This is how the Two-Brain process works. This is our science. We find the best, we interview them and we teach the best to everybody else. But the theme is that these large numbers are sustainable. They’re not abnormal. If anything, one of them said that their number is a little bit lower than it usually is. Why do I keep talking about sustainability? Well, because back in 2018-ish, starting then, there were a lot of marketing agencies who would come into your gym. They would have you sell like a six-week challenge, and that six-week challenge might cost $1,500, and you would sell 30 of these, and you’d think, “Man, this is amazing.”
Chris Cooper (06:37):
But at the end of the six weeks, 10% of people would ask for a refund, 90% would never come back. And so, you’d run the challenge again—yada, yada, yada. You washed the good people out with the newcomers, and you actually found yourself six months later in a worse spot than when you started. And now you had to undo all this bad marketing and bad hype. But what happened was that first month, your revenue numbers would spike. And so, people would be so fired up after the first 30 days that they’d be like, “This is it. This is the answer forever. I’m running a million-dollar gym.” And of course, that didn’t happen. The second month it didn’t work as well. The third month it worked less well. And by the six-month mark, they were back to where they started with no marketing plan and no way to actually improve.
Chris Cooper (07:18):
We don’t do that. What we want here are sustainable numbers through best practices that we’ve derived by science and taught these gym owners. So, while these gym owners are all in Two-Brain, they’re all applying the model slightly differently with different emphases on different parts of the client journey. Now I’m going to share exactly what they’re focused on because that’s going to be what’s helps you. The first person on the revenue leaderboard said, “This is now our baseline because we’ve been focusing on increasing average revenue per member.” So not increasing client headcount, but revenue per client or per member. Think about it, if you’ve got a hundred people in your gym and your ARM goes up by $5: Whether you raise rates or add personal training or add an on-ramp or whatever that is, you’ve made another $500 per month right there without adding another single client that has to be coached or managed or tracked or resold or retained.
Chris Cooper (08:09):
And that $500 falls straight to your bottom line. You can use that just as take-home pay to you. You can use that to hire other people, get tasks off your plate—whatever you want. But increasing ARM for most gyms is a more powerful lever than adding more clients. The next person said, “We are just doing the basic things well.” This is so important that I want to repeat it: “These numbers are not extraordinary for us. We’re just doing the basic things well.” That’s virtuosity. And so, what that means is that they’re doing their sales process really, really well. They’ve got four funnels that they measure and improve all the time. They’ve got client check-ins or goal reviews that they’re doing with every client every quarter. They’re doing good personal training; they’re doing good groups, delivering a good product—and that’s probably it.
Chris Cooper (08:58):
They might have one more thing; they might have a kids’ program or a seniors’ program or whatever that is. But you have to get really, really good at the basics. And that’s where the growth comes from. It’s rarely the new thing. It’s almost always getting better at the current thing. And once we teach you the basic model, you can dive in and just keep getting better and better for years. And this leaderboard recipient proves it. The next person said, “Next month’s revenue is already forecast out to $58,000 U.S. So, we think this trend is going to continue.” Next, this one said, “This is quite normal for us. Our revenue only fluctuates about $7,000 per month depending on how many new people come in. But our baseline is not determined by how many new members join.” I think that’s really, really important that no matter how many new members join, they know that they’ve got a high revenue number no matter what, as long as they keep doing the basics really, really well.
Chris Cooper (09:49):
So this gym owner had some really good quotes, and they’re unique because they have some seasonal fluctuations in revenue, but they plan for it. So that means they coach sports teams. Sports teams come in spring, summer, fall—less so in the winter or vice versa. But even in their down months when they don’t have a bunch of teams coming in, they’re always still top three in revenue. And that’s because they’ve learned to level out their revenue by supplementing it with things like supplement sales, with things like retail. So, “While we’re down from our high in November when apparel sales are very high, we’re higher now because we’re offering more one-on-one training, and we pick up revenue from being paid for bigger ticket items that rolled over to another month.” OK. Here’s a couple more quotes on large revenue numbers. “Increasing average revenue per member by offering specialty courses and also a higher-level nutrition program.”
Chris Cooper (10:41):
“We use goal reviews to upgrade prescriptions.” They’re doing the basics. They’re doing them very, very well. The next quote was, “I think our revenue is high compared to most due to the amount of personal training that we do. All of our group memberships are hybrid, and we have recurring personal training memberships.” Two things there: If you’re selling personal training packages, get off of those and sell personal training memberships. Second, at this gym, if you buy a group membership, it includes one-on-one personal training, and of course, the value is higher, so the price is higher too. You cannot just buy group training at this gym, which I think is absolutely brilliant. It takes guts to start selling that. But I’ve never had a gym that started doing that turn around and say, “It was a bad mistake. I’m changing my mind.” Another quote is, “We’ve been focusing hard on retention and goal setting sessions, and two months into the year, we are doing very well, better than ever.” Focusing on the basics.
Chris Cooper (11:32):
By the way, the theme of virtuosity is our theme at twobrainsummit.com. This year, while we are teaching some brand new things, we think it’s more important than ever to reinforce this focus on doing the basics better and better and better. Don’t change the plan; get better at the plan. Next, this quote is, “We charge a lot. Our ARM is between $700 and $800, which is personal training and nutrition coaching combined.” So, they’re a personal training center. They don’t have a group training option, which keeps their price point very high. They don’t need as many members to have a high revenue number. The next one said, “We track leading KPIs for staff. So, we track sessions booked in advance, conversations initiated each week by our salesperson, client touch points for our clients, and everyone has a target number that they’re held accountable to—a number that we know correlates to lagging KPIs like sessions and revenue.”
Chris Cooper (12:20):
So this is a more advanced gym owner. They’ve been with Two-Brain for a while. Not only do they know their Simple Six metrics and know how to improve them, but now they’ve gone a step beyond, and they’re looking at KPIs in their staff that they know and have tested to drive revenue numbers, right? They’ve learned how to read a P&L, they’ve learned what levers actually affect that P&L, and now they know what levers to pull. And so, they’re experimenting a little bit. This is more advanced stuff that you usually see in our Tinker program. Another quote was, “We are selling quite a lot of PT, and we have nearly 500 members. Our membership is only $108 U.S. a month, but our PT session price is $130 per session.” So, if you think about the gyms in the States who say, “Oh, I’ve got $400 or 500 members,” and then, you know they’re selling at a low rate, like 100 to 120 bucks a month, and they’re saying, “We’re just going to sell group; we’re not going to sell personal training.”
Chris Cooper (13:13):
I mean, this is the difference between an affillionaire, somebody who has a lot of clients below revenue, and a really successful gym owner who has both clients and revenue. It’s just that one little thing. You’re giving people the option to train one-on-one if they want it. That’s all it is. You know, and a lot of people, they want to do CrossFit, or they want to do hit, or they want to do kickboxing, but they don’t want to do it in a group, especially at first. That’s all it is, is giving them what they want. Another quote is, “We currently have 200 plus goal reviews in the calendar with people we meet every three months.” So important, they’re using the prescriptive model. If a client comes in and says, “I want to solve this problem,” the gym can say, “Here’s the best path for you.” They’re not saying, “Come and try a free group,” because they don’t know if that’s the best solution for them yet. Right?
Chris Cooper (14:00):
It’s like a doctor handing out free Tylenol on Fridays. You don’t know if that’s going to solve the patient’s problem until you meet with them and actually make a professional diagnosis and prescription. OK? And of course, that prescription should change over time. As the person adapts to your program, you want to be a step ahead and telling them, “Here’s what comes next,” instead of waiting until they stop seeing gains, and they go looking for different programming or go to a different gym or quit altogether. Here’s another quote from a leaderboard leader: “What was special is that we hit a home run on lead ads. We got 250 leads; our normal is 25, and we booked 80 No Sweat Intros that resulted in 55 sales. So, we need to hire an NSI booker to keep up with the leads.” So, what I love about this is they know their numbers, and they know how to improve them.
Chris Cooper (14:48):
250 leads, 80 No Sweat Intros booked. OK? So, your set rate is only about 30%, maybe 33%. You know that you can improve that. And if you improve that to 40%, you’re going to have 100 NSIs instead of 80. And now you look at the next metric: 55 sales out of 80, whatever percentage that is, right? Close to three quarters. Well, if you can improve that, bring that up to 80%, that’s going to get you more clients. So again, we teach people how to read these metrics so that they know what levers they can pull in their business and keep improving forever. Another quote: “I’ve been in business longer than most. We focus on one aspect of the business at a time until it has the strength to carry itself, and then we move to another revenue stream.” Super-duper smart. A lot of people, maybe they read my first book, and they’re like, “Here’s 30 sample revenue streams.”
Chris Cooper (15:39):
“I need to go out and start five of these right now. We’re starting kids, we’re starting masters, we’re starting competition, et cetera, et cetera.” And really what should happen, according to these people on the top revenue leaderboard, is that you do one thing, you do it really, really well until it is at a point where it’s driving good revenue and then you think about maybe going to the next thing, or you decide if there’s more opportunity to just keep getting better at your primary thing. You know, a lot of people on this revenue leaderboard would say the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. So, they’ll have group and personal training, they’ll have No Sweat Intros, they’ll have goal reviews and that’s it. They don’t add anything else. They don’t add different streams of programming. They just keep getting better and better and better at those four core things instead of constantly adding more stuff.
Chris Cooper (16:23):
Another quote: “We are a baseball-softball facility, so we’re based around teams. We focus on volume and numbers of memberships, but we’re shifting to go deeper with our clients this year to do more private and semi-private lessons and be more profitable.” And that’s what put them on the revenue leaderboard is that slight shift in focus from client headcount to ARM. What are we left with here? Well, client’s headcount is important. You do want lots of clients, but ARM, client value, is even more important. And so, the quality of what you deliver is crazy, but also the amount that your client delivers back to you in the form of price is also super-duper important. If you want to be at the top of the revenue leaderboard, that’s the first prerequisite to having a very profitable gym. And this podcast is called “Run a Profitable Gym.”
Chris Cooper (17:09):
High revenue is definitely one of the most important metrics, way more important than client headcount. There are people on this leaderboard with 500 clients, and there are people with 150. If you don’t learn anything else from them, learn that client value is really crazy important. What gives value to clients? A little bit of optionality. You don’t have to train in a group; you can train one-on-one. You don’t have to train one-on-one; you can train semi-private. It’s a couple of options to solve their problems, adding a nutrition program or a kids’ program or et cetera—and staying focused on virtuosity, mastering the basics, getting better and better and better at the system instead of changing systems all the time. Our theme for Summit this year at twobrainsummit.com is virtuosity. We’re really focused on helping you get better and better at that. We’ve done this now with thousands of gyms worldwide. I’d like to see it happen for you too. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” If you’ve got questions about this podcast as always, just go to gymownersunited.com. That’s a free Facebook group with 9,100 other gym owners in there. There’s no coaches. There’s no trolls. There’s no jerks. We filter them all out. Just helpful, meaningful advice from me and my team and 9,100 other gym owners around the world. Thank you for your service.
The post 6-Figure Monthly Revenue? It’s Possible & Here’s How appeared first on Two-Brain Business.
