Chris Cooper's Blog, page 78

Adding a “High Ticket” Option at Your Gym: Why, How and When

I’ll be honest with you: I hate the term “high ticket.”

It feels sleazy.

However, I think gym owners and trainers should have a max-speed, max-value option that costs a lot more than what they’re currently selling. I have a few reasons.

First, most gym owners are wildly undercharging for the value they provide. Many “high-ticket offers” should just be the normal offering.

Second, many clients really want to get to their goals faster. Not everyone. Maybe 10 percent of the people in your audience are impatient. They should—and will—pay for speed. Failing to offer them the fastest possible route to their goals is holding these clients back. And impatient clients (like me) will keep wandering around and looking for the fastest option instead of starting right away. Yes, you read that right: Cheap prices and discounts push some clients away. Like me.

Third, thinking through the absolute best plan will force you to rethink your other offers: “If I’m putting together a high-ticket service and it’s completely different than my normal service, is my normal service really getting results at all? Or is it just getting results more slowly?” Remember: When people buy high-value offerings, they’re buying speed.

Fourth, selling a high-ticket option for the first time usually proves to gym owners that they’re more valuable. They start to see their other services differently and adjust everything to suit.

Fifth, a higher price will often force clients to stick to the program. Paying more is sometimes good for them. It’s certainly true with many of my clients: If they weren’t paying for 1:1 attention, they would shrug off the expense each month, half-ass their efforts and get no results.

Sixth, a higher-touch service creates more opportunities for your staff.

The Exact Steps

Here’s how to present a high-ticket offer:

Pull out the value stack you created in the previous post in this series.

Remember: The whole stack is worth far more than the sum of its parts. The features (recipes, check-ins, stretching videos) might take you little to no extra time to create and supply, but they add immense value to the client, and that’s what’s important.

Get with your mentor to determine your high-value offer and its price. For many people, this is around five times the price of their average group-class membership. That’s how much value they can deliver when they put so much focused attention into a client.

Add the high-ticket offer to your sales binder.

Prescribe the option when it’s appropriate for the client’s goals.

When Should You Add a High-Ticket Offer?

Here are some other tips on “when” to offer the high-ticket option:

1. You should be in late Farmer Phase of gym ownership—the second stage, in which you have a foundation under you and you’re looking to grow. It’s a mistake to add a high-ticket offer before your service, systems and processes are absolutely dialed in. You’ll burn through your best clients by failing to deliver on your promise. Waiting for Tinker Phase—the third phase—is best. (Take our quiz to find out what stage you’re in.)

2. You should also be comfortable with the sales process and know when to make a higher-value offer. If you’re still trying to guess a client’s budget and sell what you think they can afford, you’re not ready to sell something more valuable yet.

3. You should have the experience to confidently say, “I can get you there faster.” You really don’t want to make a big promise at a high price and then fail to deliver.

4. You should know when a service like this is best for clients, regardless of their budgets. If they can’t afford it, they’ll tell you so—and then you can sell them something else. But don’t project a “no” that isn’t actually coming.

Look, there are now a dozen people who will teach you some high-ticket sales tactics. But you should feel good about your high-ticket offer before you sell it—and that’s why I refer to it as a high-value offer.

I know how much impact such a service can have on the life of a client, so I’m eager to sell it to the people who need it most. Book a call with your mentor to build an offer like this!

The post Adding a “High Ticket” Option at Your Gym: Why, How and When appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Value Stack: High-Speed Solutions for Gym Clients

I love giving people bonuses and gifts.

I especially love giving them gifts with real value.

When it comes to my clients, I create value by creating speed.

Getting clients to their goals is valuable. Getting them there faster is more valuable.

A “value stack” is when you add services and products that will get clients to their goals faster.

For example, if I asked myself “what would this client need to lose 20 lb.?” the answer is “three workouts per week, protein at each meal and not overeating.”

If I asked myself “what would this client need to lose 20 lb. in six months?” that warrants a different answer. In this case, the client would need:

A specific meal plan.Four workouts per week plus some non-exercise activity (NEAT).Daily accountability texts: “eat breakfast,” “go to bed on time tonight,” etc.Some recipes to keep them on track.Stretches to do at home so they aren’t too sore to exercise.A sleep tracker.Some support from their spouse.A grocery shopping list.An app to track activity and intake.Possibly a supplement or two.

To accomplish the goals faster, the client requires more from me—but not all of these things require my time or attention. Some are automations, many are products, and some are resources I can build once and use forever. But all of them have value.

Your Value Stack

How do you determine what to put in your value stack?

Start by thinking about the obstacles a client will have in reaching stated goals. How can you remove those obstacles in advance?

For example: The client doesn’t eat enough protein because he doesn’t know what protein is.

Solution: Add a “protein sources” PDF.

Another example: The client is just too tired by Friday, so she sleeps in, skips her workout, misses breakfast and grabs a garbage burrito on the way to work. Then she’s mad at herself and begins to spiral.

Solution: Teach her how to shut down and get to bed on time.

Removing obstacles in advance will add tremendous value to the client.

And that’s what you charge for: value, not time spent. You can add value without selling your time by the hour.

List all these value-adding assets together to create your highest-value offer. In the next post in this series, I’ll tell you how to price it; read the previous post to learn how to put this stack in your pricing binder.

My goal here is to show you how to scale your value without selling more of your time.

Value-Stack Rules for Gyms

Here are a few rules:

1. Don’t discount anything. You’re not helping anyone when you do that.

2. Don’t cut your rate on something you charge for. For example, never give a client 50 percent off nutrition coaching when they pay for personal training—that just undervalues your nutrition coaching.

3. Remember, your goal is to avoid trading more time for more money. Add value through products, guides, apps or automations where possible—just be sure they actually add value instead of just piling on overwhelm. Many people don’t want another app to use.

Technology creates leverage that increases value. But so does care: Simply knowing what can derail a client’s progress and then solving those problems in advance makes you a valuable coach.

The post The Value Stack: High-Speed Solutions for Gym Clients appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How to Set Gym Rates (and 3 Ways to Charge More)

Chris Cooper (00:00):
Most gyms don’t make enough money. The gym owner thinks they need more clients, but that’s wrong. Most of the time they’re not making enough money because they’re not charging enough. So how do you set your rates? Today, I’m gonna tell you exactly how to do it and what mistakes to avoid. And I’ll give you three amazing ideas that will help. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and I’m gonna show you some tools that you can get for free in our public Facebook group, Gym Owners United. You can just go to gymownersunited.com, ask for the “How to Make $100K With 150 Clients” guide, and we’ll give you this stuff. Now, most gym owners screw up their prices because they don’t know how to set their rates. And so what they do is they look at the other gyms in town and they think, “Okay, well, I’m gonna provide a better service than that person, but if I want to attract more clients, maybe I’ll just price mine a little bit cheaper.”

Chris Cooper (00:49):
Little do they know that the gym that they’re copying didn’t know how to set their rates either, and they did the same thing. And so over time you get this descending price point for CrossFit gyms, for HIIT gyms, for bootcamps. And it’s all because nobody started with the math that I’m about to share this with you. So I’m gonna start with how to set your rates in the first place. This is a tool that we call the Microgym Profit and Loss. It’s like a sandbox tool. It’s like a spreadsheet that you can pop numbers into anywhere. You can throw numbers into the yellow columns if you want to, and you’ll see everything else automatically change. I’m only gonna talk about a couple of things here cause I don’t want to intimidate you with a crazy spreadsheet, but if you go into gymownersunited.com, we will give you this for free if you ask for it.

Chris Cooper (01:33):
So here’s the first rule of thumb. You’re gonna start by putting in all of your fixed expenses. So this is not your staff, but it’s everything else. So this would be, for example, your rent if you’ve got a loan payment. Okay, you can put them all in right here. Enter them all in there one at a time. I’ve got my affiliation fees in there, what I think a cleaner’s gonna cost, et cetera. My insurance fee—it’s all in there. If you don’t have some of these expenses, just make ’em a zero. You wanna put all those in first. And then what you wanna do is you wanna change the number of clients to 50 on the spreadsheet. Okay? Now, don’t worry about your membership price. We’re gonna set that in a moment.

Chris Cooper (02:12):
Don’t worry about all this other stuff. You can just kind of zero that out for now. And what you wanna do is you want to add your price until you get to this number. So this number here is $9,550 on my sheet. That’s my total expenses. The average for most microgyms, by the way, is about $11,000 per month, not including coaching or other labor or your pay, okay? Just the cost to flick the light switch on in the morning is around $11K. How do I know that? Because we publish the biggest data set in the industry with tens of thousands of gyms. But what you wanna do right now is you wanna say, “Okay, if we start with 50 clients, what does my price need to be to be able to make $9,550 per month? So just to cover my expenses and break even. Nobody’s getting paid. I’m doing all the work.” A good rule of thumb is that 50 clients should pay for your expenses. So now what price do I actually need to cover those expenses? Well let’s see here. My average membership price, if I make it $150 with 50 clients, yep, that just basically barely gets me over. So that is gonna be like your average membership. That’s not gonna be your highest value membership, but I’ll come to that later. Another good rule of thumb here: With a hundred clients, you should be able to get a little bit further, right? So a hundred clients should get you earning an extra $50K a year. And this is still assuming that you’re doing most of the work. With a hundred clients, that’s gonna be a lot of work. And for a lot of people, this is where they have to start hiring staff and stuff.

Chris Cooper (03:38):
But let’s see, you know, if we get to a hundred clients, what happens to that price point? Okay, so that gets us to $19,000 a month. That’s an extra $10K or so. We’re gonna have extra expenses, though, because with a hundred clients, we’re gonna have to hire some help. Now, I’m not gonna go deeper into a P&L with you—too boring. But if you want some help with this, you can book a call with our team and talk about mentorship. We will walk you through this step by step and make sure that you’ve got the right prices set. Here’s a key I want you to understand: If $150 is your average price, every single discount that you give will drive that down. Every single price point below that that you offer will drive that down. Every time you comp a coach’s membership, that pulls that average down. Very few gyms are actually hitting this average.

Chris Cooper (04:23):
What we really wanna be worried about here is this number—ARM, or average revenue per member. And that number has to be higher. It has to be about $205. I can explain why average revenue per member is higher than your average membership price in a moment here, but I don’t wanna spend all of our time together walking you through a spreadsheet. So you can get this at gymownersunited.com. You can play around with all the golden squares, or, even better, you can talk to a mentor and just kind of build this custom to your gym. Now, let’s say that you started off and you’ve calculated your average rates or your ARM, and it’s just way too low. Super common. This is probably the most common thing that happens in gyms that we work with at Two-Brain Business, and we’ve been through this now with over 2,000 gyms. There are a few things that you can do to correct your average revenue per member, including selling personal training, adding an on-ramp program to properly onboard people safely and comfortably, and possibly adding some nutrition coaching or accountability—things I’m gonna be talking about next.

Chris Cooper (05:15):
But you can pull up your ARM if you need to just fix it without doing a rate correction. It’s not the first step that you have to do. However, eventually you’re gonna want to fix your rates if they’re too low, and we hear this all the time. Look, it’s scary. It’s a multi-step process. It’s not as easy as just sending the right email and, you know, praying. But a mentor can really help you reduce stress. We’ve done rate corrections in over 900 gyms with minimal losses, and every single time the gym has come out of it making more money. Even if they might have lost a client or two, they were actually making more revenue afterward. Okay? Now I wanna give you some tools that will actually help you sell your true value in the gym instead of underpricing, undercutting yourself, undermining yourself, working hard for the same or less money.

Chris Cooper (06:04):
The first one is a pricing binder. This is so simple. The way this helps is it just gets your pricing out of your head and onto paper. It makes the conversation just so much easier when you’ve got a client in front of you. So here’s what you do. You bring the client in and you do a No Sweat Intro. It’s a very short motivational interview where you’re talking about like, “What are your goals? What do you hope to accomplish?” Then you ask a few more questions, which we teach in our mentorship program. And then you make a prescription. Now you are an expert coach. I don’t have to tell you like how to make a good prescription for a client. You’re going to look at the client’s goals and you’re gonna say, “Okay, here’s exactly what I think you need to get to those goals.”

Chris Cooper (06:42):
And then you open up your pricing binder, okay? And you’ve got it beside you here and you say, “I’ve got a couple of other questions for you. I think we need to train three times a week, and I think that we can stick to a habit-modification plan, not even a diet. We don’t even need that. A couple of questions for you. Number one: When it comes to nutrition, do you think you need more knowledge or do you think you need more accountability?” Okay, and they’ll say one or the other and you just mark that down. “Okay, great.” And then you say, “When it comes to exercise, do you think that you would prefer exercising in a small group with other people or do you think you’d prefer exercising one-on-one with me?” Okay, and you note their answer. And then from there, what they’ve basically done is they’ve chosen your accountability program for nutrition, or they’ve chosen personal training, or they’ve chosen group. Whatever it is, you flip open your pricing binder, which should look good. It should look pro, right? Some of us do this on an iPad. You flip that guy open and you say, “Okay, well, based on what you’ve just told me, your investment is $239 a week” or whatever that price is. And they see it on the binder. What this does is it instills a lot of trust. It makes you seem like, “Hey, you’ve been here before and you’re not just pulling prices out of your butt.” It also makes it seem like you’re not in the middle of a negotiation. It stresses people out when they think that you don’t know what you’re doing or you’re trying to just get as much money outta them as you can. They don’t trust you. When you open up a binder and “oh, there’s the same price that everybody pays,” that builds a lot more trust.

Chris Cooper (08:11):
I’ll tell you, for me, it really helps me get over the mental burden of like, “Oh my God. I gotta say this price.” And especially when I was a broke gym owner, I would always project my budget—broke gym owner—onto my clients. Like I couldn’t even afford my service. And so I just imagined that they couldn’t either. And I would be scared to tell them the real price or I’d be looking for excuses to just give them a discount or bring that price down. A pricing binder is powerful because it does instill some trust in the client, but more than anything, it helps you get over that barrier of feeling weird about sales. Okay? Some gym owners do feel weird about sales. You shouldn’t, but I understand why you do. That was me for many, many, many years. The second tool I want to give you today is called a value stack.

Chris Cooper (08:55):

Now, when somebody buys into your program, what they’re buying is a result. And what you can do is offer to add little things that will get them to that result faster. When people sign up for coaching, most of the time what they’re trying to buy is speed, right? They want to get to their result faster. And so that means that you can add in little things that will get them that result faster, and you’re adding value as you do. Okay? So I’ll give you some example here. Here’s a list of things that you might add to a value stack. Now, keep in mind that you’re not just trying to dump stuff on people. You’re definitely not trying to overwhelm them. That will actually slow their progress down. What you’re trying to do is ask yourself like, “Okay, if I wanted to get them to this goal that they have faster, what would they need?”

Chris Cooper (09:40):
Okay, so what would the client need to lose 20 pounds? They need your core exercise program—CrossFit, boot camp, whatever that is. And they need protein in every meal and to not overeat, right? But if they wanted to get there faster, there’s a couple things that we could add. So maybe they would need a specific meal plan. Maybe they would need four workouts a week instead of three and some non-exercise activity like walking in between. Maybe they would need some daily accountability texts to keep them on track. Like, “Hey, did you eat breakfast?” Or, “Hey, go up to bed on time tonight.” Or whatever it is. They might need some recipes to help them stick to what they’re supposed to eat so they don’t just get overwhelmed and give up.

Chris Cooper (10:22):
They might need some stretches to do at home in between sessions. They might need some support from their spouse. And you can help with that. They might need a grocery shopping list, right? They might need to know how to do meditation at home or a little guide that you write on how to shut down electronics an hour before bed. They might need some supplements. Whatever you think would speed up their progress, you can add these things in a value stack. Now because you’re creating extra value, they should reciprocate that value by paying a higher price point. But here’s the key. You’re not just selling more of your time; you’re trying to sell things that scale. So, for example, let’s say that you put together a recipe book of 50 top recipes that people could use if they were on a keto diet or they were watching their macros or whatever, right?

Chris Cooper (11:08):
And you can get these booklets. If you’re in Two-Brain, you can get samples from the Two-Brain Content Vault. You can get them in a lot of different places, but you’d have to pay for them outside Two-Brain. You get them these recipe books, right? You write this book, and you put it together once. Maybe it takes you a couple of hours, but you can use this with the next 300 clients, and you don’t have to remake it every time. With texting, you can set it up, and with the first client, you’re gonna do it manually, but then you can automate that with software once you’ve got that text process down. And then it just goes forever. So when you’re adding stuff to a value stack, you’re looking for things that either you can buy or you can build once and then leverage after, you know, hundreds and hundreds of times.

Chris Cooper (11:50):
If you subscribe to an app that will let them track their workouts or whatever, that adds value to the client as long as you’re not dumping five different apps on them. If you’re shooting videos on stretching, wonderful. If you’re pointing them to a sleep-tracker app, that’s free. That adds value, too. If you’re including a supplement like—“Okay, on your request, we’re gonna give you a greens complex here, and we’re also gonna give you some samples of a pre-workout” or whatever you’ve got. That all adds value to them, and it doesn’t take up more of your time. So that is the key to the value stack: adding things that have time leverage. Things that you either build once or you buy. Things that increase the value that you’re giving to the client, that increase the value that they pay you, that isn’t just like more and more time.

Chris Cooper (12:36):
Okay? So that’s our second tool that you can use. The first one was a pricing binder and the second one is a value stack. And the third one is what we would call “adding a high-value offer,” but many people call it “adding a high-ticket offer.” I’m sure by now you’ve heard the term “high ticket.” I’ll be honest with you: I hate the term “high ticket.” It just feels sleazy to me. High ticket is like, “what can we get them to pay?” High value is “how much value can we possibly provide to the client and receive value in return in the form of payment?” There’s a fine line there with the language, but there’s a huge difference in perception of value when you’re giving it, and that’ll make it easier to sell. Okay? So now I do think that gym owners and trainers should be offering a maximum-speed, maximum-value option that creates a lot more than what they’re currently selling.

Chris Cooper (13:30):
And I’ve got a few reasons for this. The first reason is that most gym owners are wildly undercharging for the value that they’re already providing anyway. You know, as I said at the start of this video, you’re just charging too little. So many high-ticket offers should probably just be like your normal offer. Second, a lot of clients want to get to their goals faster. Not everyone. You know, maybe 10 percent of the people in your gym are impatient, or, like me, they can afford to pay for speed. They don’t wanna wait. And so if you don’t offer them the fastest possible road to get to their goals, somebody else will. And impatient clients like me will go out and look for that. Okay, so you heard that, right? Like higher-value, higher-speed prices actually attract some higher-value clients, where cheap prices and discounts actually repel them.

Chris Cooper (14:17):
Okay? The third reason you might want a high-ticket or a high-value offer is that thinking through “what is the absolute best plan?” makes you audit your current plan. So, for example, if you ask yourself the question, “How do I get this client to lose 20 pounds faster?” what that’ll actually do is have you map out what it takes to make a client lose 20 pounds. And if your current offer doesn’t really fit into that, you might wanna rethink your current offer. So it’s actually a good audit on the service that you’re providing, right? If your high-ticket offer is completely different than your normal offer, and your normal offer doesn’t really get results, then it’s time to rethink your normal offer, right? Remember, when people buy a high-value offering, they’re not necessarily buying a different service. They’re buying speed, okay?

Chris Cooper (15:09):
Fourth, selling a high-ticket option for the first time usually proves to gym owners that they can charge more and that people will pay it—that they are more valuable. That’s the thing that I like best actually—that the first high-ticket offer you sell is so reinforcing that you’re worth it that you start to see other services differently, and you adjust your entire mindset to suit that. Fifth, a higher price point will often force clients to stick to the program. Look, paying more sometimes is good for them. It’s certainly true with many of my clients. If they weren’t paying for one-on-one attention, they just wouldn’t show up, they wouldn’t do the work, and they wouldn’t get the results, right? And six, a higher-touch service creates more opportunities for your staff because you’ve got a little bit more margin there. Your staff can earn a little bit more using the 4/9ths principle, and they can serve the clients to the level that they wanna be served.

Chris Cooper (16:01):
The last reason is a simple sales one. Having a higher-touch or higher-ticket or higher-value program in your pricing binder anchors the client’s expectations for what’s to come. If they see $225 a month, that’s not as scary if the first option they saw was a thousand a month. All right, so here’s the exact steps to setting up this high-ticket offer. And I I give you this one third because you’re gonna need the pricing binder, and you’re gonna need your value stack. Okay? So remember, the whole value stack is worth way more than the sum of its parts. So all the features that you’re adding, like the recipes and the check-ins and the stretching videos, might take you a little bit of time to set up, but you’ve only gotta do it once, and then you’ll have it forever. You don’t have to resupply them or reshoot them every Monday, but they still add immense value to the client, right?

Chris Cooper (16:48):

So get with your mentor, figure out what’s in your value stack, figure out how much that speeds up a client’s process and what to charge for that, and then set your rate based on that. Okay? For many people, this is around five times their average membership price, which we set earlier in the video, okay? So I’ve given you some really easy rule of thumbs here. And then, you know, add these to your pricing binder of course. But I’ve given you some really easy basics. First, 50 clients should cover all of your expenses, including rent. I know people in Seattle and San Francisco are gonna be like, “Well, that’s crazy. I paid $12,000 in rent a month.” But your prices should reflect your rent. You don’t charge the same as I do in Sault Ste. Marie, where rent is a fraction of that, right?

Chris Cooper (17:34):
Your prices should be reflective of the local income where you are. Now I will say that a lot of people really wanna help communities who have no access to gyms, and so they’ll put a high-value gym in an area that just can’t afford it. That’s a mistake. What I like to say is make lots of money and give it away. So instead, what you could do is put your gym in a better location, make lots of money, and then volunteer twice a week in this poorer neighborhood and do your classes for free. Like don’t mix your high-value service with “I need to give discounts. I need to give it free.” Like be really clear about who the clients are who are going to pay for this service, be clear about who you’re going to serve who can’t pay. If you’re gonna do something cheap, you’re better to do it for free.

Chris Cooper (18:20):
Okay? When should you add a high-ticket offer? Because this is not for everyone. If you’re late in the Farmer Phase of entrepreneurship (meaning you’ve got an established bricks-and-mortar option); you’ve got some seasoned, qualified coaches; you’re not brand new; you’ve got a good foundation; you’re making a good income (you should probably be already be making close to a hundred thousand dollars a year); you’ve got all of your systems and processes written down, optimized, dialed in; your marketing is working; you’re good at sales—that’s when you all add a high-ticket offer. If you do it too soon, you’re gonna flub it. You’re gonna get leads in who are interested and you blow it in the sales process. Or you’re gonna sign people up and your ops won’t be at a good level and people will quit. Or your staff won’t be trained highly enough and people will quit.

Chris Cooper (19:06):
You do not wanna burn through the early adopters of your high-ticket program because once they’re gone, they’re gone, and there’s far fewer of them than normal clients. You should also be super comfortable with the sales process. You should know when to make the higher-value offer. It’s not the first thing you offer to everybody. You have to know when that will actually speed up the client’s process. Again, you’re not trying to guess at their budget. Their budget is different than yours. But if you’re doing that, it’s a sign that you are not ready to sell a high-ticket offer anyway. You should have the experience to confidently say, “I can get you there faster. And I know how.” Like if it was an emergency and you had to get somebody down 20 pounds in three months and your normal program would get them there in six months, nine months, you need to confidently be able to say “I know what would speed the process up.”

Chris Cooper (19:55):
If you don’t know that, don’t sell it. Right? Finally, you need to know when a service like this is best for your clients. Look, if they can’t afford it, they will tell you so. Okay? There are a dozen programs out there that will teach you how to sell high ticket, and they’re gonna teach you how to do sales, and you’re gonna do rep after rep after rep. But the reality here is that you need to practice enough to get comfortable with your own rate. You need to be experienced enough to know that you can confidently deliver. If you are not sure that you can get them down 20 pounds by adding accountability and recipe books and everything that they’ll need, then don’t offer it yet. You’ll get there, but it’s not time yet. All right? Look, I’m Chris Cooper. I want gyms to be successful.

Chris Cooper (20:38):
The number one reason they’re not is that they’re undercharging. I’ve given you a tool to help you figure out what your pricing should be. Minimum. I’ve given you a tool to help make sales easier: the pricing binder. I’ve given you a tool to help you increase value called the “value stack,” and I’ve given you a process to build a high-value offer for the 10% of clients who want and need that. This podcast is called “Run a Profitable Gym,” and I hope that if you haven’t, you join our Gym Owners United Group today. I answer questions in there all the time. I do free webinars around once a month, and I give you all kinds of tools every couple of weeks to help you grow. If you’re ready for mentorship, just book a call with our team and we will help you through all this stuff. Press the easy button. You don’t have to learn how to run a P&L or figure out the math. You don’t want to guess wrong. Guessing wrong, if you underprice yourself by $10 per client per month, you are setting yourself back by thousands of dollars every single month, and sometimes it can take you months or years to fix that mistake. Just charging the right price up front, this is the first step to running a profitable gym. Hope this helps!

The post How to Set Gym Rates (and 3 Ways to Charge More) appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The Simple Sales-Office Hack That Will Help You Stop Losing Sales

“OK, how much does it cost?”

Whenever I got this question at my gym, I would take a few seconds to answer.

The reasons were many: feeling less than confident, projecting my own budget onto my client, feeling that asking for money amounted to greed.

Sensing my discomfort, many potential clients lost faith in my service—if I didn’t believe in it, why should they?—and they delayed starting their fitness journeys. Some didn’t start at all.

I didn’t know it at the time, but one action would have saved me from all of those feelings, helped me make thousands more per month and helped dozens of people find fitness faster.

That action?

Taking the money conversation out of my head and putting it onto paper.

Gym owners still harm themselves when talking about money:

They underprice their service, usually by over 40 percent.They project their budget (very low) onto every potential client.They hate asking for money, so they look for ways to discount their too-low price.They prescribe what they think a client can afford instead of what a client actually needs.They push people into group classes too fast because they don’t want to “sell” a proper onboarding.They sell what they like instead of finding out what the client likes.

I’m sure you could add to that list, right? I know I’m guilty of committing a dozen additional errors.

Below, I’ll tell you how to solve all your problems.

Create a Simple Pricing Binder

Start with your most effective package—the training plan that will get a client the fastest results. This is also going to be your all-in, most-expensive, let-me-solve-your-problem-for-you offer.

Write that on one piece of paper—just the price and the value stack. This isn’t a brochure.

Next, write down your personal-training rates on one page. Put the most expensive option at the top. Limit yourself to three options, max.

Then do the same for group classes. Same rules: most expensive option at the top for price anchoring, with a maximum of three options. (Protip: Don’t offer an “unlimited” option—it’s too vague and confusing.)

Finally, if you have a specialty revenue stream—like kids or legends—write those rates down on a separate page.

You don’t want every price on one page; you want a maximum of three things per page. Use big type for clarity.

Put your pages all together in a binder.

When a client comes in, take some time to understand the person’s goals and motivation. Then make a prescription: If money were no object, what would you recommend?

Then ask, “How does that sound?”

They’ll ask for the price or just say “sounds good.”

Flip to the relevant page in the binder. Avoid the temptation to present every possible option—that will overwhelm the client and kill momentum.

Show the price: “Here we are. Our rate for your best option is $459 per month.”

Sign them up and begin onboarding.

Keep It Simple, Then Start Training

The pricing binder can also be presented on an iPad, but don’t worry about being super slick or professional. I still personally use printed pages, Arial font, and black text on white paper.

At this point, the client already wants your service—your job is to get out of the way. Remove barriers such as overwhelm, too much information and too much choice, and just get the transaction out of the way so you can start changing the person’s life.

The sales binder is a massive roadblock remover for the client–and usually for the coach, too.

The post The Simple Sales-Office Hack That Will Help You Stop Losing Sales appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

3 Tactics to Ensure January Joiners Make It to March—and Beyond

Everyone in fitness knows people often join gyms in January and leave in February and March.

Here’s a 2019 stat from the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association (IHRSA, which is now branded as the Global Health and Fitness Association): When it comes to New Year’s joiners, “14 percent quit by the end of February, and 50 percent quit within 6 months.”

It’s early February, so you definitely have some at-risk clients—whether you know it or not.

Direct from Chris Cooper, here are three specific things you can do this week to ensure new clients don’t become former clients in the next six weeks.

Retention Tactic 1

Do this: Make sure your new clients have a 90-day goal.

We recommend gym owners create an entire client journey that has a great deal of emphasis on the first 90 days. What you do in the first three months will have a significant effect on retention. A mentor can help you optimize your client journey, but if you don’t have one, here’s your stop-gap solution: Simply connect with new clients now to make sure they have a goal in mind.

The best way to get clients focused on something is with a sit-down Goal Review Session. You can certainly do that, but don’t hold off on talking to new clients while setting it up. At minimum, make a list of your New Year’s clients and connect with them according to this hierarchy: a sit-down meeting booked within three to five days (best), a quick in-person chat after a workout, a phone call, a text, an email (worst).

Just do something to get new clients thinking about goals. Make sure you keep track of those goals. In some cases, you’ll even have a chance to upgrade your service to help clients reach the goals they come up with.

Retention Tactic 2

Do this: Schedule 30-day check-ins for all new clients.

If you get a New Year’s client off the fence by talking about goals this week, you must follow up within 30 days to ensure they aren’t wavering.

New clients can’t always see progress and think they’re failing. Or they’re losing momentum. Or maybe they actually aren’t getting results and need an adjustment to a program. If you check in again in 30 days, you can solve a lot of problems and prevent cancellations.

Here’s a protip: Schedule this 30-day check-in right as you’re implementing Tactic 1. Say this: “We’ve got a goal and a plan in place. Let’s meet in 30 days to review progress. When are you free?” Get the appointment in the calendar now. Don’t circle back later when it’s easier for an at-risk client to ghost you.

You’ll review progress toward the goal at this meeting, you’ll celebrate wins, and you’ll make adjustments to the plan. But you’ll also address any other issues that come up. A powerful question: “How are you doing right now?” Another good one: “What challenges are you dealing with at present?”

Retention Tactic 3

Do this: Develop a “communication rhythm” with new clients.

Implement a plan to keep in touch with your new clients so they’re never on their own for long. The exact rhythm will depend on your workload, staffing and systems.

For example, if you’re a sole proprietor working 80 hours a week, you’re probably not going to have time for daily texts (a mentor can help you get more done in less time). If you have a client success manager—a critical role in a strong microgym—you can have that person handle comms, and you might be able to get daily emails out the door.

The point: Figure out what level of communication you can handle and then stick to the plan. Your minimum goal is to have clients expect to see your name in their in-boxes on a schedule. Your maximum goal is to re-engage flagging clients by giving them extra care and attention.

You don’t have to get extreme here. You could, for example, write down “15 ways to get the most out of the gym” and send one tip every two days for the next month. Or maybe you send a “Motivation Monday” email followed by a “how was the week?” video text on Friday. Maybe you call every 10 days.

Regardless of the details, pick a plan and then stick to it so your new clients know that they’re on your mind. Try to get them to respond to your communications. Radio silence? Ramp up your efforts with that client. Silent, absent clients are about 10 seconds from vanishing forever.

They Have to Stay to Get Fit

Don’t lose a single hard-won client without a fight.

If you let clients fade out, you aren’t doing your job. They came to you for help getting fit, and they haven’t made much progress since Jan. 1. You know they’ll need months and years of help to accomplish their goals.

Use these three retention tactics this week and you’ll have the greatest chance to change your clients’ lives.

The post 3 Tactics to Ensure January Joiners Make It to March—and Beyond appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Top Parenting Tips for Fitness Entrepreneurs

Mike Warkentin (00:00):
You do not eat that Lego! You get that outta your mouth. Do not wave that pool noodle at me, young man. Oh, Joleen, I’m dying here. You’ve got three kids. How do you run a fitness business and be a parent?

Joleen Bingham (00:11):
I have a lot of tips that I am happy to share with you.

Mike Warkentin (00:15):
Oh, thank goodness. Entrepreneurs with kids, this is the show for you. This is “Run a Profitable Gym,” and this episode will help you run a great business and be a great parent. I’m Mike Warkentin. I would love it if you would hit subscribe and give us a little love on whatever platform you are currently on today. I’ve got Joleen Bingham with me. She’s the CEO O of 13 Stripes Fitness, she’s a Two-Brain mentor, and she’s the parent of three young kids. She’s here today to help you run a great gym and be a great parent. Joleen, welcome to the show. Are your kids sleeping?

Joleen Bingham (00:46):
No. I got them off to school today.

Mike Warkentin (00:49):
Okay. It’s super efficient already. I need you to show us that you are the real deal. Give us proof of life here. What’s the craziest entrepreneur-with-kids story that you’ve got?

Joleen Bingham (00:57):
Okay. So I don’t know if you would call it “crazy,” but it may be the most real entrepreneur-with-kids story. I had just had my second kid—he is now almost 7 years old, so this was almost 7 years ago. And it was well before I knew systems and boundaries and scheduling. And I had just given birth. I’m talking like literally just given birth in the hospital. And I’m sitting on my phone answering emails and taking a call from somebody who called the gym because I thought I had to answer them at that point. And so that’s kind of when I knew some things had to change. That was a little ridiculous. But wow, I thought I had to respond to everybody immediately or the world and my business would end.

Mike Warkentin (01:40):
So actually in the hospital and you’re just like taking gym calls and taking care of business.

Joleen Bingham (01:45):
Yes, yes.

Mike Warkentin (01:47):

You’re tough!

Joleen Bingham (01:49):
It, it was not something I would ever do again and definitely not something I recommend anybody ever do.

Mike Warkentin (01:54):
But that story clearly shows listeners that you know what you’re talking about, and you’ve got not one but three kids. What are the ages of them?

Joleen Bingham (02:03):
16, 6 and 4.

Mike Warkentin (02:05):
Okay. So you’ve got a nice range. They’re spread out, they’ve got different schedules. One is probably almost driving, one is probably still not even close to those things. That one is still playing with different toys. You’ve got a whole bunch of different things going on. Plus you’ve got a husband, a thriving business, a mentorship practice—you’ve got all the stuff going on, so we’re gonna get into it and help people figure out how to manage their stuff as well. So how did your life change as an entrepreneur when you had kids? Were you prepared for this or was it huge challenge? What was a shock? What happened?

Joleen Bingham (02:31):
I would say it was a huge shock. So I’m a little bit different because I have an older kid. I had a kid before we became entrepreneurs. So I had that experience of coming home after work, and you had the whole night to yourself. And then we bought our first gym when my son was 10 days old. No, we bought it right before he was born. Sorry, getting my timeline. But at that point, I realized I had no clue what I was doing. This was pre-Chris Cooper days. This was before I reached out to Two-Brain, before I had gotten help. And I thought, “Oh, you know, I’m just gonna buy a gym, have my workout with my friends,” and then the reality sets in of “I don’t know what I’m doing. I have a kid who needs me for everything. I have a 10-year-old who needs me for everything, and I have a business that I have to be there all the time for.” So big shock.

Mike Warkentin (03:30):
Okay. First of all, as a woman, you are “the thing” for a new baby. I’m just basing this on what my male friends have told me: The mother at that point is everything to that child. So was that your experience where you had to provide everything, and you’ve gotta run a business at the same time?

Joleen Bingham (03:52):
Yeah, even more so with my third child. And I know there was only two-year difference there, but she was what I would call “a high-needs baby.” She would have to be carried everywhere. I would have to hold her. She couldn’t sleep without touching my hand or my arm. So very much so exactly how you describe it.

Mike Warkentin (04:10):
Okay. And when you had the other ones, the stress, is it exponential? Does it multiply? Do more children equal more challenges as a parent?

Joleen Bingham (04:22):
Yes, from a standpoint of scheduling, right. You know, you’ve gotta be multiple places multiple times, but also making sure they get attention. So now you’re not just dealing with a business that needs attention. Now you have three separate individuals that rely on you for everything that need attention as well and love—and deserve it.

Mike Warkentin (04:37):
Yep. And I don’t have kids, but I’ve got two giant dogs who are actually right behind me. My wife told me when we were getting the second one, she’s like, “Well, if you’ve got one, you might as well get two. It’s just the same amount of work.” And it’s definitely not. It is exponentially more work. It is not double the work. It is like four times the work because they multiply off each other. So I’m sure kids are kind of the same way. So let’s get into tips here. What are your top tips for entrepreneurs with kids?

Joleen Bingham (05:01):
All right, so tip number one is schedule, schedule, schedule, schedule, and have a weekly meeting about your schedule. Plan it out in advance. I’m known as an operations person, so anybody in Two-Brain knows I like to systemize things. I like things in order. I wasn’t always that way. I became that way because I had to. So I have a weekly schedule that I review once a week. Every single night before I go to bed, I sit down and I write out my daily schedule. So everybody always has it in Google planner, but I create it. I schedule admin time. I schedule time with my kids, schedule one-on-one time with my kids, and I schedule my workout time, which I think is really important for entrepreneurs, especially in the fitness industry. I think sometimes we forget that part of it. But I run my family calendar like I would run my business calendar.

Mike Warkentin (05:50):
Wow. So that’s pretty regimented.

Joleen Bingham (05:52):
It’s very regimented. While I say that though, you also have to be flexible within it, right? Because if you have kids, kind of like dogs, they don’t have a, a certain schedule that they follow. They don’t look at a calendar and say, “Oh, it’s Monday, we have to go to school today.” You have to tell them that when they’re little. So that flexibility of, “Well, maybe I have a set schedule, but now that it changes.” I’ve gotta sit down and rewrite it, too.

Mike Warkentin (06:18):
Yeah. I have a problem where I will dial in a schedule, and if something goes off the rails, I get mad and then I get frustrated. Then everything else starts to suffer. So being flexible within that is definitely a great tip. And I’m gonna ask you this as a follow-up question. You said you weren’t always this way. So for people who aren’t schedule oriented, how do you make that shift to suddenly look at your entire day, hour by hour, minute by minute?

Joleen Bingham (06:39):
Being very intentional with it. And so every night before I go to bed, taking five minutes, right? I’m old school: I still use a paper planner to schedule up my day and my tasks. Everything lives on Google so that we can share it. But I think that’s the first step is understanding I have to do it. And setting aside just five minutes to start.

Mike Warkentin (06:59):
Okay. So people out there, if you are not a schedule person, you can change that. Take some baby steps toward it and start small. But use the tools available to you, whether you’re a paper-and-pen kind of person or whether you’re a Google person, put those schedules in place. I love the idea of reviewing it before you go to bed. That kind of sets your intention for the next day. Like, that’s a great thing where you wake up and you already know what you have to do. Do you lay your clothes out before you get up, too?

Joleen Bingham (07:22):
I do actually. Well, and I’ll say this is kind of a funny parent story. My 4-year-old still, she’s my high-needs kid. She still has to sleep with me. So some of it is I like to plan it out, but some of it is “I don’t wanna wake her up.” So I can kind of sneak out the door, and I’m an early morning person, so I sneak out and get to work.

Mike Warkentin (07:42):
Okay. And I can tell you that we’re recording this podcast early on a Monday morning, and Joleen was here at the exact appointed minute on schedule. So there you go. That’s proof. What’s your next tip? What else you got?

Joleen Bingham (07:54):
Boundaries. Set boundaries and stick with them. And again, this came from me sitting in that hospital bed with my son. I had no boundaries at that point, obviously a newborn and on the phone. But have defined work and family times. And I think that came from that. But the thing that really dialed in for me is I read a book by Todd Herman called “The Alter Ego Effect.” And talking about when you’re in one role, being that role, and when you’re in another role, being that role. That’s simplifying it. But that’s really what I got from it. But as a parent, creating the version of myself that I wanted to be at home. But that means I needed to create boundaries for that. So when I walk in the door, my attention is on my kids, and I’m not sitting there thinking, “Oh man, I have five leads I have to follow up with,” or, “My business is gonna fall apart because I don’t answer emails.” Because if I don’t give my kids the attention, they’re gonna fall apart realistically. So having those boundaries and knowing that I can say no to certain things that aren’t during that time. So work time is work time. Family time is family time.

Mike Warkentin (09:03):
Okay. So let me ask you a scenario question. I love the story you told at the beginning. It’s pretty powerful. You’ve just been through this birth, you’re lying there in a hospital, and you’re probably drugged outta your mind and in pain, and you’re answering the phone. Like that’s just a surreal experience to me. What would you do now? What would you have set up or how would you set the boundaries now if, let’s say, you had a fourth kid and the phone rings in your hospital room. How would you have made that switch that you don’t have to answer anymore?

Joleen Bingham (09:30):
Ok, well let’s clarify: There will be no fourth kid.

Mike Warkentin (09:34):
Sure. I understand.

Joleen Bingham (09:36):
Three is plenty. What I would do is put a process and system someplace for my staff to answer the phone. You know, SOPs. I’m a big operations person, so writing out how somebody would need to do it, creating the process for if it didn’t go well. If they needed me in an emergency, what that would look like, what my response time to them would be. I don’t think there’s any emergency that anybody would need to reach me at this point. There wasn’t then, either. I just didn’t know that.

Mike Warkentin (10:03):
So the lesson for people who are listening and saying “I can’t not respond to the call” is not to abdicate responsibility. It’s to delegate it, and create the systems and procedures and roles that will then handle that stuff so that you don’t have to. It still gets handled, but not by you. Correct?

Joleen Bingham (10:19):
Correct. Exactly. Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (10:21):

I’ve had the same experience where some work stress is bugging me, and I’m trying to interact with dogs or a family member. You feel guilty and horrible about it. And Two-Brain mentor Kenny Markwardt has written about this, too: He sets specific time for his kids aside. And you said that before in the show that you actually do it with each individual child, correct?

Joleen Bingham (10:39):
Yeah, I realized that, and my 6-year-old actually reminded me of this. I’ve done this for a long time, but he needed some attention from me in this past week and he said it. We went on a field trip, and he said, “You know, mom, it was really nice just to get you one on one.” And that triggered like, “Okay, I need to be even more intentional.” What I’m doing with him once a month isn’t enough. Maybe once a week we sit down and play a video game. Cause that’s how he likes to interact.

Mike Warkentin (11:06):
What does he play?

Joleen Bingham (11:08):
He likes to play BedWars, which is in Roblox. Mm-Hmm. So that and a pet simulator. I don’t know. All the Roblox games seem to like him.

Mike Warkentin (11:16):
Nice. And how do you block off that time? Like, do you set a do-not-disturb thing or do you put your phone in a tinfoil bag? Or what do you do so that all the intrusions of being a mentor and a business owner don’t get into that family time now? How do you maintain those boundaries?

Joleen Bingham (11:30):
Two different things. So I wear a watch that has notifications, which I know a lot of people do. Garmin, Apple, whatever those are. I turn off the notification. So I shut off the Bluetooth to my watch, and then I also put my phone on the counter—away. Or if it’s really been a distracting day, I’ll actually put it in my bedroom so that I can’t just walk by it and look at it.

Mike Warkentin (11:49):
Yeah, I’ve noticed that’s a big one. And if you’ve ever find that you’re constantly nervous twitching to your phone, putting it physically—like even 10 feet away or out of sight—really stops you from doing it because all of a sudden you can’t just tap your pockets and find out that it’s there. You have to physically get up and do it. And that really helps you keep your attention on what you’re doing. That’s a good tip whether you’re working, podcasting, doing any other stuff or even working with a family member. What other tips have you got?

Joleen Bingham (12:17):
I just wanna add to that one. There’s a funny story with that. So if you really have a hard time with that, give your child the phone in a box. Tell them to put it somewhere for a little while.

Mike Warkentin (12:28):
That’s good! Kids are really good at hiding stuff.

Joleen Bingham (12:33):
Yes. Sometimes you really need that extra help.

Mike Warkentin (12:34):
Have you ever done that?

Joleen Bingham (12:37):
I did not intentionally do that, but that’s where I got the idea from.

Mike Warkentin (12:41):
Did you ever find it again?

Joleen Bingham:
I did, yeah.

Mike Warkentin:
 Okay. Cause I know some kids are so ingenious. Everybody has a nap on the couch and all of a sudden we don’t know where the phone went. What’s your next tip?

Joleen Bingham (12:51):
Okay, so the next tip is involve your kids. I just talked about setting boundaries, boundaries are fantastic—but your kids also can be part of your business and feel special and care about what you do and learn from you.

Mike Warkentin (13:08):
I wouldn’t have thought of this. Tell me more. This sounds awesome.

Joleen Bingham (13:11):
So I think one of the things that I’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs about is that school isn’t teaching their kids the skills they need to run their businesses later in life. Schools are great, right? I love teachers. I was a teacher myself for 12 years, but they don’t teach entrepreneurial skills for the most part. Some do. But if you have your kids as part of your business, they get to spend time with you. You’re teaching them life skills. You’re teaching them how to interact with people, which I think is huge with all the technology that we have. Those customer-service skills. You’re teaching them multitasking, problem solving, all these things that they need to be successful in life. And they get to spend time with you and see you and have fun with it.

Mike Warkentin (13:51):
That’s a brilliant one. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Gimme an example. Like what do you do? Gimme maybe two examples. One with your oldest child and one with one of the younger ones. How would you integrate them into a business in a way that will help them be part of the family and the business?

Joleen Bingham (14:05):
So my oldest one, as a 16-year-old, the, the way that I have helped integrate her is having her teach me social-media stuff. That sounds silly, but she’s the one who taught me how to use TikTok. Your videos on it were fantastic. But she’s the one who showed me the apps to use, and she looks over things and says, “Oh mom, that’s not great.” Or, “This is good.” So that’s how I get her involved. My little ones, it’s something simple as, you know, helping to set up weights. I don’t train anybody anymore. But if they’re in the gym when somebody else is there with a trainer, they can go get a band, they can go get weights, they can see how those interactions occur.

Mike Warkentin (14:45):
Wow. You know, maybe five or six years ago, I was at a client’s house for a Christmas party or something like that. And I ended up playing video games. I think it was a racing game with one of the kids. And we were talking. Cause I’m a media guy, I said, “What’s cool? What are you guys looking at on social media now?” Cause I knew it wasn’t Facebook anymore. Like, kids don’t really care about that. And he said, “TikTok.” And that was the first that I had heard of it. And I can’t remember if it was six years ago or not, but it was whenever it was starting to become a big deal. And it was a kid who told me about it. And he must have been, I wanna say 14, 15 at the time. It’s the same advice I give to gym owners now when they say “I don’t know how to film things. I hate social media. I don’t understand.” I’m like, “Find the coolest kid at your gym and give that person the phone and let that kid run with it.” Because kids now grow up on this stuff. You’re not picking it up as a 35-year-old person or whatever. They’re living it and acquiring it. Your best social media manager might be your 12-year-old.

Joleen Bingham (15:42):
Yes.

Mike Warkentin (15:44):
And you’ve got your little one, or one of your little ones, setting up weights and just learning client service and helping people out and putting things back and organization, scheduling, all these different things. They’re actually huge life skills.

Joleen Bingham (15:56):
Yeah. And we give welcome bags out, simple ones, and she’ll help put those together.

Mike Warkentin (16:01):
Wow. So do they understand, the older one for sure, but the younger ones, do they understand the concept of the family business? You know, like is that a thing? My parents had traditional jobs. I wouldn’t maybe have understood that at a young age. Do yours?

Joleen Bingham (16:13):
I would say if you ask my 4-year-old, it’s hilarious because I actually filmed her doing this. She wants to work out when she grows up. So apparently she thinks mom and dad work out all day for their job. But she understands that she comes to the place that we own and that is ours.

Mike Warkentin (16:30):
What a cool concept that is to give a kid at a young age.

Joleen Bingham (16:33):
Yes. And I’m hoping that even if she chooses to do something other than the business—my oldest has made it clear she is not being a part of this business, at least for now, right? She’s in that stage. But I’m hoping that at least I’m giving them the skills to create the life that they want for themselves.

Mike Warkentin (16:48):
And I know Chris Cooper, Two-Brain founder, is big on this, and he does do outreach in his local community to try and get young entrepreneurs to understand the concepts and grow as entrepreneurs to try some cool stuff and to look at entrepreneurialism as a career choice. And again, not a criticism of the education system, but an entrepreneurial mindset is very different than a memorized-and-recite kind of mindset that you often get in a school setting. So Chris works really hard on that. He’s also got the Business Is Good podcast. If you’re looking for more from Chris and more on entrepreneurialism in general, that’s where you get it: Business Is good. Check that out. More tips. What else is in the bag?

Joleen Bingham (17:25):
Oh, one of my last tips biggest tips is dealing with guilt as a parent. So I know I call it “mom guilt,” but I’m, I’m sure there are a lot of dads who feel the same thing. So if I say “mom guilt,” I mean “parent guilt” as a whole. There are so many times that you know, we think that we’re doing something wrong because we’re not following the standard pathway, right? Entrepreneurs are a different breed of people, right? We don’t work a nine to five. But it’s just like when you talk to your clients about eating that extra piece of cake, right? So you had an extra piece of cheesecake over the weekend, guilt is what you let it be, right? Like you could take that guilt and run with it for a month if you wanted to and beat yourself up for it. But guilt is really what you create of it. So look at it as kind of this cultural expectation that others have of you as to what your work hours should be. So, for example, I work and I do mentoring calls between certain hours. I do clients between certain hours, but those hours might not be normal. And somebody might look at me and say, “Well, why are you doing this at this time? You should be with your kids then.” But they don’t see that I’m at every single sports event or that I am at every field trip or that I’m at every drop-off and pickup. They have their preconceived notions. We see that so much on social media, right? “This is what a parent should be. This is what a mom should do.” We kind of take that in so we’re not screwing up our kids, right? We have to get past that. We’re not screwing up our kids. We are giving them tools that they can use for the rest of their lives. And I know we fear. I do every single day. I look at my 16-year-old, and I’m like, “What did I mess up today with her?” Like, I know I screwed something up, but we don’t have to listen to others, right? So if our kids are happy, they’re healthy and we’re spending time with them, it doesn’t have to fit society’s view of it.

Mike Warkentin (19:25):
That’s interesting. And it, he reminds me of an old “Seinfeld” episode. He’s a comedian, right? So he works Friday night, he works Saturday night. Like he doesn’t have traditional hours. And I remember he was doing a show and everybody’s in the dressing room, and they’re just behaving like animals. And he says to them, “I know it doesn’t look like work to you, but this is how I make a living.” And that’s really the entrepreneurial thing. Because I stagger around in a bathroom a lot of the time. I think my neighbors, they don’t have a clue what I do, but this is the media job working remotely, right? So same thing for entrepreneurs. I’ve done the same thing. People don’t understand if they have nine-to-five jobs. They don’t understand when you worked. Maybe you worked like 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. and now you’re taking three hours off in the middle of the day. Like that’s an interesting perspective. So that’s really cool what you’re saying: to really evaluate what your own situation is, not through someone else’s lens, but through your own lens. And I’m gonna guess you’ll tell me a lot of the stuff that you’ve talked about here would work not just in terms of dealing with kids as an entrepreneur but dealing with a spouse or a significant other as an entrepreneur. Would you agree with that?

Joleen Bingham (20:29):
Very much so. Almost exactly the same. And I think it really speaks to dealing with people in general—your friends, your family. Your kids just are a little more dependent on you.

Mike Warkentin (20:39):
Now your husband is very involved in the business, correct?

Joleen Bingham (20:40):
Correct. Yes.

Mike Warkentin (20:42):
Yeah. I have the same situation. My wife and I are very involved in our business, but I know there are others where one works a traditional job and one runs a business. There can be some major conflicts in there because they’re two different worlds, where one person has a nine to five, and I know they’re getting blurry with lines now, but maybe regimented time periods that they schedule for work. Whereas the other person’s running a business, and there are no boundaries unless you set them. So everything you’ve said here, even if you’re listening as a person without kids, it works with a partner. I think. So think about how some of that works. Joleen, we’ve talked about problem solving and so forth. Tell me about some of the joys. We touched on the one of involving your kids in your business. Tell me about some of the other joys of being an entrepreneur and having kids. What’s good?

Joleen Bingham (21:23):
I think the biggest one is I’m there for my kids. And I’ve worked really hard, and that’s where those systems and processes that we talked about come into play. Being able to be on their field trips, being able to drop ’em off at school and pick them up at school. If they get sick, I don’t have to worry about childcare. I can be the one who’s there with them, or my spouse can, right? Because we do have the flexibility within our business. I’m able to provide my kids the type of schooling and look at non-traditional schooling for them as well because of it. So to me, the biggest thing is freedom of time and that time with my kids.

Mike Warkentin (21:57):
Yeah. And that’s a huge one. And you know, I’ve experienced the same thing where I say a sick family member or somebody needs something. If you run your business properly, you can take some time to take care of that. And that’s just a beautiful thing. A lot of owners will be out there saying, “I cannot see a path to this.” So my question for you as a mentor is how did gym owners get away from “I’m overwhelmed, I’ve got kids, I wanna be a better parent, I wanna be a better business owner. I have no clue how to do it. I’m overwhelmed and freaking out”? How do they get from that to where you are, where there are systems and processes and freedom of time?

Joleen Bingham (22:28):
First of all, hire a mentor.

Mike Warkentin (22:31):
Number one, work with you.

Joleen Bingham (22:32):
Well, yes, but number one is finding somebody to help you, right? Mm-Hmm. Knowing that you need help. That’s where I started. I picked up the phone and said, “I can’t do this on my own. I have no clue what I’m doing.” The second thing is you start simple. You write down what it is that you need somebody else to do. Write out your tasks, right? You don’t have to have a hundred-page staff playbook, right? You don’t have to have it on, you know, the app. Write the steps out and teach somebody how to do it.

Mike Warkentin (23:01):
And that could be as simple as just cleaning the floor, right?

Joleen Bingham (23:03):
Yeah. As simple as cleaning the floor. It could be as simple as answering the phone for you so that if you’re in the hospital having a kid, you don’t have to answer the phone. And so it can be simple, but I think we get too overwhelmed. So take the small tasks and start there.

Mike Warkentin (23:16):

So that’s step one, guys. And if you’re listening and you’re struggling with this, write down one task that you can offload and tell someone else how to do it. And then hire someone to do that task. And if you need a tip, start with cleaning. That is the easiest job to offload in most businesses. “You fill the mop bucket, to this level. You put this much soap in. You mop from here to here. It should take this long.” Go hire that out. That’s an hour of your time bought back to spend with your family. You can then take that process, apply it to your business from the very bottom, all the way to the very top so you can become a CEO of a whole bunch of people. We can teach you how to do that. Joleen, have you worked with parents who have been overwhelmed and then successfully helped them transition into like basically versions of you?

Joleen Bingham (23:58):
Yes. Yes. A lot of them are now at the Tinker Stage.

Mike Warkentin (24:04):
So Tinker is our upper-level entrepreneurial program. When you’ve got a great business running and you are looking for other projects, upper-level stuff, that’s the group. So you’ve actually managed to get stressed, parenting business owners into that group?

Joleen Bingham (24:14):
Yes, correct.

Mike Warkentin (24:15):
Wow. Okay. All right. So parents with kids, I say this on the show every time, no successful business owner that I know does not have systems and processes. It’s boring. It’s not sexy. But systems are the foundation. Systems allow you to have freedom as an entrepreneur. If you want to understand how to set these processes in place, how to build these systems, how to do it very fast with help from templates and done-for-you resources, Two-Brain has them. Give us a call. Go to our website, check the book-a-call link. It’s also in the show notes. Check in with us. We can help you do this stuff faster so that you can get the freedom of time that you deserve and your family deserves. Joleen, thanks so much for sharing your time with us. What do you do next? What does your schedule say next?

Joleen Bingham (24:56):
Next, I’m getting on a mentoring call to help another gym owner,

Mike Warkentin (25:00):
And when’s child time today?

Joleen Bingham (25:02):
Child time today is at 2:30. Pick up.

Mike Warkentin (25:06):

Joleen has it on the top of her head. She reviewed this the night before. She knows exactly what she’s doing in the next hours. That was Joleen Bingham. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” This is where the best gym owners in the world tell you exactly what they’re doing so that you can have the exact same success. Please subscribe for more episodes wherever you’re watching or listening. If you’re on YouTube, I’d love it if you hit that like button as well. Thanks so much. Now here’s Chris Cooper with a final comment.

Chris Cooper (25:30):

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 Top Parenting Tips for Fitness Entrepreneurs appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Vending Machines and Gyms: The Essentials for Every Owner

We might be past the days of putting a quarter in a vending machine and getting a handful of ancient peanuts.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t use a vending machine as part of the retail strategy at your gym.

Whenever I ask gym owners about retail sales, I run into two groups—and I was a member of the first one:

Group 1: “We’re terrible. Help!”Group 2: “We do exactly this and make exactly this much profit with this exact plan. Retail sales are a nice revenue boost.”

To help you move from Group 1 to Group 2, here are some tips for generating profit with vending machines at your gym.

Gym Vending Machines: Buy or Cut a Deal?

First, gym owners can buy a vending machine outright or partner with a company who will provide one in exchange for a revenue split.

Prices to purchase vary based on the size and features of the unit, but one Two-Brain client found a used machine for US$1,500. Another purchased a new unit for about $5,000.

With no endorsement or recommendation whatsover, I’ll give you some pricing points of reference below to help you start your research:

U.S. vending machinesCanadian vending machinesEuropean vending machines

The benefits of buying: You own the asset and get all the revenue. Once the machine is paid off, you might have a small but reliable cash cow in gym.

The drawbacks of buying: You’re responsible for all maintenance and stocking. One gym owner mentioned buying your machine locally might make it easier to get service when repairs are needed. Another said he fills his machine through wholesale accounts and regular trips to Costco. You’ll have to budget a little time for this, and you might end up with some cash tied up in inventory.

Several gym owners mentioned that it’s now very important to get a machine with a card reader or integrated app that allows online purchases. At one Two-Brain gym, about 90 percent of sales were on mobile devices. No one carries a handful of quarters anymore. Bonus: Modern sales systems also provide precise tracking and inventory numbers.

If you choose to link up with an outside company, you’ll have to split revenue. One gym owner reported a 50-50 deal and suggested the exact split is negotiable. Sample contracts found on the internet usually have blank spaces for revenue splits. In an article aimed at owners of vending machines, Thehustle.co suggested commissions of 10-25 percent of gross sales can be paid to acquire a location for a machine.

If you’re contacting a vending-machine supplier, negotiate to get the best rate you can. If you have options in the local market, talk to all of them before signing a contract. You’ll likely have less control over products, pricing and placement in this arrangement, but you might be able to negotiate there, too.

Vending Machine Placement, Products and Pricing

Sales and profit will depend on machine placement, product lineup, and margins.

One owner reported that retail sales actually went down when snacks were placed inside the glass box, so a vending machine isn’t always a slam dunk, even if it’s often a good way to limit shrinkage related to accidentally unprocessed payments, outright theft and the “I’ll pay ya next time” crew.

If you want to maximize sales, it doesn’t take a marketing wizard to figure out that prominent vending machines in high-traffic areas will get more use than those in dusty corners.

Another obvious one: Your clients will buy more if you stock the stuff they want. You must know your avatar and supply products that solve their problems.

Some gym owners might not care what’s in the machine, but others will want to ensure the products they sell reflect the gym’s philosophy. High-sugar sports drinks, for example, might fly out of the machine but confuse clients who hear low-carb messaging from your nutrition coach.

As for pricing, margins vary by item. You’ll have to figure out a pricing plan if you own your machine, and you won’t get the volume discounts available when you buy by the truckload.

Thehustle.co article linked above reported margins of 43 to 64 percent are common for snacks and beverages. Other items—water is one—have much higher margins. Your profit will be determined by your product lineup—and keep in mind that the mechanical elements of your exact machine will make it physically impossible to sell some products.

As a light snack, here are some real stats to go on:

One gym owner who bought a machine sold about $5,000 gross in one year and kept $2,500.Another sold about $10,000 with a 40 percent profit margin.

Neither got a vending machine to print money, but both have covered the costs of machine ownership and now have a small, low-maintenance revenue stream running.

Plan to Profit

As with any aspect of your business, run the numbers and make a plan.

If you’re thinking about buying a vending machine, be sure to factor in time for supplying and filling it, as well as maintenance costs. If you’re partnering with a machine owner, consider costs of electricity and what else you might do with the floor space.

But if you see a clear path to profit and a vacant spot in a high-traffic area of your gym, a vending machine might give your bottom line a small but not irrelevant boost.

The post Vending Machines and Gyms: The Essentials for Every Owner appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

34 Free Consultations in One Month: The December Leaderboard

Mike Warkentin: (00:01)
This is Run a Profitable Gym. I’m your host, Mike Warkentin, and please hit subscribe wherever you’re watching or listening with my thanks. Yo Derek, how many free consultations did you book at your gym in December?

Derek Batman: (00:12)
We booked 34.

Mike Warkentin: (00:14)
I’ve done that in a year. What tips you got? Have you got any?

Derek Batman: (00:19)
Oh, I’ve got a bunch of stuff.

Mike Warkentin: (00:20)
Oh, dude. Will you share with our listeners?

Derek Batman: (00:23)
Absolutely.

Mike Warkentin: (00:24)
All right. We’re gonna get into that in just a second. Now, Two-Brain has data. Mountains of it. Free consultations are the best way to get high value clients into your gym. We know this. They’re also key to retention. So how do you get people to book these appointments? Well, we track sales metrics across hundreds of gyms, and we ask the top owners questions about how they got their numbers. We get ’em to share their secrets right here on this show. On the sales side, we’ve got set rate, the number of people who book consultations at your gym. Show rate, the number of people who show up for those appointments. Close rate, the number of people who show up and buy. Derek Batman of Hardbat Athletics in Delaware earned a spot on our set rate leaderboard for December with 34 appointments. He’s averaging more than one a day. He’s gonna tell you how he did it. Derek, welcome. I’m so excited to talk to you about this.

Derek Batman: (01:08)
Mike. I’m pumped. I’m happy to be here.

Mike Warkentin: (01:10)
Let’s do it. You got a great mic. You’re gonna sound good for the podcast audience. We’re gonna roll right off the bat here. What’s the number one thing you did to get 34 appointments in December?

Derek Batman: (01:19)
So, the irony is that we’re actually going in a direction with our sales systems and lead nurture and marketing to avoid a lot of self booking. And I think that while this may have been the way a couple years ago, and some gyms do in fact find success this way, we have not. So while we found that we could get a lot of people booked through having people self-book through the website, and then every one of our lead forms and all of our marketing plays, at large, we felt that the quality of those bookings was severely reduced by leaving that door wide open. So we have actually taken the approach here of trying to reach out to our clients as fast as possible and self-book them ourselves. So for instance, when a new client signs up at the gym, let’s say they’re coming in from a Facebook ad that we had posted. My general manager, who is probably 95% responsible for all of our lead nurture, is trying to reach out to that person within five minutes.

Mike Warkentin: (02:23)
Okay. So you see a lead come in and your GM is responsible for contacting that person as soon as possible and trying to book an appointment. Have I got that right?

Derek Batman: (02:31)
Correct. And those are during on hours. So we run that kind of like 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, that’s the role for her. Now, are there times where that will be impossible because she has another consult or something going on? Sure. And I think that in the future we’ll look at ways to be able to fill those gaps, but for the time being, her ability to get ahold of these potential customers has increased significantly. And during the off hours, they are still contacted within five minutes. It’s just via the way of automation.

Mike Warkentin: (03:02)
Every single marketing expert that I’ve spoken to on this show says that speed of contacting is one of the keys to make sales, and the first thing you have to do is get that person in for a free consultation. So you’ve got it down to five minutes. How do you do that? Does your GM sit an office doing office work? Does she coach? How does it work? How is she able to respond in five minutes?

Derek Batman: (03:22)
Well, first I’ll speak to the importance of it and then I’ll speak to the how. So I think for us, what we began to recognize was that while having a booking link available for people as part of all of our advertising was getting people, to book appointments, they felt as though they were going through a system rather than talking to a real human being. Whereas getting a hold of somebody on the phone, be it text or a video message or on the telephone through a call, we were able to establish rapport immediately and develop this kind of, Hey, you’re gonna be going through a human-provided experience to where your coach is already listening to your goals and your wants. And that’s a bit more comforting for somebody, especially when that comes from cold traffic. So that’s kind of why we started to focus more on this area. The how was just in realizing that it was so important based on the data that Two-Brain provides, plus what we’re able to extract from everything we’ve learned throughout the years. And just realizing that her role was best fulfilled in this very moment, in putting her time and attention into the sales process.

Mike Warkentin: (04:31)
Wow. And are you getting these leads, did you say from Facebook? Or where do you get most of your leads coming from?

Derek Batman: (04:37)
Well, I would say that we run, everyone knows that right now lead forms are gonna be the best in terms of just being able to capture the largest audience. You’re kind of throwing out a wide net and it seems as though that people are responding the best coming off of lead forms. But I would say that we’ve also ramped up our effort at doing things like creating lead magnets to get people into our email list, but also putting a massive focus on retargeting and being able to get consistent exposure to the types of people that we want coming to our facility. So yeah, I mean, I don’t know how deep you want me to go on this, but yeah, we’ve done a lot of research on our end to figure out who we want to target and how we’re gonna target them and how we’re gonna continue to get repeated exposure in front of these people.

Mike Warkentin: (05:20)
So let’s dig into that a little bit. So tell me, is it a Facebook system or what do you use exactly there to, you’re using paid stuff or more organic things like lead magnets, bringing stuff in, like what are you using there to generate just the initial volume that then your GM can then use to book those appointments?

Derek Batman: (05:37)
I would say there’s a couple things going on here. So, we did an audit of our top 20% of clients to really get hyper focused on the type of types of people that were not only, they were not only valuing their own health significantly and enough to warrant onboarding into the system, but they were also sticking around. So the average revenue per member was high, the length of engagement was high, and that lifetime client value was high. So we said, okay, if we were to look at the commonalities or common denominators amongst these people, how do we break it down into a couple different characteristics and then try to target those people on social media? And one of the things that we know is that once you can get your ads in front of these people, it’s not just that initial exposure, it is the repeated exposure that is likely to have them come your way.

Derek Batman: (06:24)
So what happens oftentimes is that it can be difficult to say exactly where someone came from because they may have seen your ad nine times on Facebook and then eventually worked up the courage to seek you out on Google. So while it may come through as a Google lead, or they might write it in as a Google search, it might just have been by the product of the amount of times you’ve exposed your content to them. So it can get a little bit difficult, but we feel as though this is also helping us get warmer leads by this consistent exposure rather than relying exclusively on just lead forms that are attracting a very cold traffic.

Mike Warkentin: (07:01)
So what I’m hearing there is you’re targeting a very specific thing, you’ve got your avatar probably dialed in, you know exactly who you want and you know that type of person based on your current clients. A lot of gyms don’t do that. They’ll just kind of carpet bomb everything, try and get as many leads as possible. eads are great. But sometimes if you get really poor ones, like you said, it eats up a lot of time for salespeople and they’re just not people who are actually interested, right? If you’ve targeted those people and kind of pre-screened them a little bit, you are gonna get much better people and you can spend more time on fewer people who turn into great clients. Does that sound like an accurate summary?

Derek Batman: (07:34)
Yeah, absolutely, Mike. And one of the things that’s really nice also with the way that we go through our booking process is that because of the fact that you need to be in touch with a coach in order to establish that appointment time, it also allows my GM to then go through the pre-qualification process with a person, find out if they’re going to have objections that she might be able to work out over the phone, or even let them know that we may not be the best facility for them, and even potentially in some cases recommend other facilities. But this again, allows us to attract the right clients to us and deter the ones that we don’t feel are a good fit.

Mike Warkentin: (08:06)
And I’ve heard that before from other gym owners. When they speak to people ahead of time, they’ll often get a lot of critical information that then they can use in sales meetings. And it’s harder to skip out on a sales meeting or a No-Sweat Intro, or whatever you wanna call them. But it’s harder to skip on that when you’ve spoken to a person who’s taken the booking and said, I will see you here at 1:00 PM. Right. You can certainly do it, and people do, but it’s harder to do that than when you just self-book something, you click into a slot, you don’t have a name and a face or anything like that, and you just, eh, I don’t feel like it anymore. You click or you just miss. Right. So there’s some interesting stuff going on there. Did you see your show rates improve when you changed this system to talking to the people and booking them yourself?

Derek Batman: (08:45)
We did. Yeah. So this is one of the main reasons that we had changed this was, it wasn’t just the quality of the people coming in, but the number of the people coming in when they actually spoke to a real person had had changed as well. So yeah, that was a big part of it.

Mike Warkentin: (08:59)
Was it dramatic? Was it like a big spike where all of a sudden, whoa, we hit a speed bump there?

Derek Batman: (09:03)
You mean in terms of when we made the shifts, the show rate?

Mike Warkentin: (09:05)
Yeah. Like, did you notice right away your metrics are like, whoa, 50% more people are showing up now?

Derek Batman: (09:11)
I would say it had less to do with the absolute volume of people showing up and more to do with the quality of those that were. Yeah. Yeah. Which ultimately I’m saying that’s

Derek Batman: (09:20)
Just important. At the end of the day, every facility operates differently. For us, one of the beautiful things is that we do consider ourselves more of a high ticket type of facility. So it behooves us to be a little bit more rigorous in that process of vetting people before they come in. Whereas if we had a lower barrier to entry and we were allowing people in at let’s say, you know, $150 as part of an onboarding process, we would be much more comfortable with just kind of allowing them to come in and then they would naturally kind of vet themselves over an amount of time. Whereas for us, we don’t wanna inflate or pressure test our systems unnecessarily because we’ve been in the business now for 11 and a half years, so we have a really good idea of the types of people. Not only that we can serve best, but the types of people we want to serve.

Derek Batman: (10:04)
And that allows us to be a little bit more picky as part of the onboarding. One of the things I always remind our coaches is that I had it wrong for the longest time as the owner. I thought that the hard part was getting members, but in actuality, the hard part is getting the right members. I thought I could put an ad out there tomorrow for some sort of a free onboarding or very cheap onboarding, or discounted offer, and open the flood gates. But that affects my culture. That affects our ability to serve those people. And the hard part is attracting the right people and keeping them.

Mike Warkentin: (10:37)
Your experience mirrors my own. I have run some challenges. Back in the past we got a lot of people in the door. We had a lot of people sign up and it destroyed our staff because we just weren’t equipped for it, and then we didn’t retain very many of them. The retention on that was very poor. So acquiring them for a short-term challenge went just fine, but ultimately they weren’t the clients we wanted to serve because we hoped that they were gonna stay long-term and they didn’t. So what we would’ve done better, I think there, was screen out the people who were just there to try it out and then move on to the next thing and find the people who really wanted to form a long-term relationship with us, where we can really help them over a period of years. And so Chris Cooper’s talked about this: the right people are really the foundation of the retention period, because it’s hard to retain the bad people, right?

Derek Batman: (11:17)
For sure. Yeah. And I think, this is why we’ve dug into our data. And I would bet that most gyms would find a similar result, which is that the people that value their own health and their fitness are the ones that are paying you more. And they’re also the ones that are sticking around longer. So you’re almost doing yourself this major disservice by catering to the people that just wanna get into the door, compared to the people that you have to do a little bit more work for and really prove to them your value in order to gain theirs. But if they value their health, then you can prove that you’re the vehicle to be able to get them over some of these more complex issues or hurdles that they’re facing. You can bring someone into your building that’s gonna stay around for the long haul.

Mike Warkentin: (12:02)
So we have tons of tactics at Two-Brain to help people get more appointments. What are some other things that your mentors helped you do?

Derek Batman: (12:09)
So we had Shawn Rider through Growth, and I’m now with Kenny as part of Tinker. And I would say, for Shawn, he was really good about helping us become unemotional about creating the systems and unemotional about making decisions around how to optimize our sales systems. Because it can be difficult in the beginning, because anytime you turn these dials that affects others. And for instance, when you’re aiming for a higher quality lead, you’re probably gonna get less of them, right? And when you’re going through a pre-qualification process, you’re probably gonna talk to less people in the building. But then you see the close rates going up and you see that front end revenue and you’re like, okay, this makes sense. So having somebody there to kind of help you through that process, to hold you accountable to the things that you’re doing so you actually see them through for an extended period of time, to where the data actually means something to you. Because if you do this for 15 days, it’s just not enough time to see it through. And then also kind of keeping you focused on the task at hand because it becomes really easy to allow yourself to become distracted.

Mike Warkentin: (13:13)
One of the things you mentioned here, and that I’ve heard is key from every sales expert on the show, data. Tracking your data, right? So when you make these changes, if you don’t track the data, you don’t know if it actually worked, or if you’re spending too much money, too little money. You need to track things, guys. And we have sales metrics that we teach our clients exactly how to, like Derek mentioned, front end revenue, how much are you selling? And then you start looking at how many of those people are retaining, what’s the long tail on this thing? And you start to realize cost per lead numbers balanced against really great long-term clients don’t matter so much. If you don’t have any of those metrics, it becomes a just, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re flying blind essentially. So it’s great that you mentioned that because you can’t make decisions without data.

Derek Batman: (13:51)
Absolutely. Well, and there’s the flip side of this too, which is, we talked about it from a negative implication perspective of when you make these adjustments and you don’t see as much money coming in right away. But there’s also the opposite problem, which is that this is where the six week challenge came about, where people were running a lot of six week challenges where they would see this huge, massive influx in that front end revenue, but it ended up destroying their culture and it ended up doing more damage than good over the course of the next three months. And this is why it’s important to track these things. ‘Cause if you’re not tracking that, you can constantly get into this slot machine type of mindset where you’re like, okay, another six week challenge, another six week challenge. But little by little you’re just like eating away at the culture inside of your facility

Mike Warkentin: (14:34)
And wearing down your staff because honestly some of these challenges, there’s so many people that show up, which is great, but if your business isn’t stress tested, kinda like you said, you can have a real car wreck and it becomes a great challenge for staff. And we ran into that for sure at our gym. Now, even though though you’re screening out people and you’re looking for a very specific person, you still book 34 of them in. That’s pretty great. Has that number increased when you first made these switches to try and find very specific people? Were your set rates a lot lower than they are now with 34?

Derek Batman: (15:06)
The set rate has fluctuated over time. I would say that part of what’s allowing those 34 appointments is that I have just fully taken over our marketing and have made a large effort at getting focused and good at that. And I think in absolute terms, our just total amount of leads that we’re able to get is far greater than it was at this time last year, even six months ago. It has made a drastic climb. So what you’re seeing in the way of 34 booked appointments is coming off the back of 200 plus leads coming in on a monthly basis.

Mike Warkentin: (15:43)
Aha. So there’s the link. Okay. Now talk to me about a few things that you’ve tried that didn’t increase leads. Was there anything out there or set rate, pardon me? Was anything else there that you’ve done that was like, ah, that was a mistake and I wouldn’t do that again?

Derek Batman: (15:55)
I would have to say that it would just be relying too heavily on automated systems. So everyone has become much more sensitive to marketing these days because of the fact that it’s so easy to have your information auto-populate on, let’s say a Facebook lead form. So for instance, if I’m on Facebook and a lead form comes up for something that I’m potentially interested in, within three seconds, there’s no friction. I can just click, auto-populate my name and information, and then click submit. But because of the lack of the friction there, sure, you’re gonna get that person coming through, but you’re also gonna get a lot of people forgetting the fact that they even submitted information. So what was happening was these automated texts would go out and as much as you tried to make them feel personalized, people would get this feeling of okay, great, now I’m just stuck into this labyrinth where I’m gonna keep getting perpetual texts. And they would wanna opt out even though they just gave us their information, which was puzzling to me. But now having a better understanding of the fact that that’s just the nature of cold traffic and people that are able to submit, so frictionless, all of their information to you, they’re used to opting out of systems on a frequent basis. So by getting them in contact with a real human early, we kind of change their perspective of who they were talking to. Now all of a sudden, it’s a small gym feel rather than a big system automation.

Mike Warkentin: (17:20)
And that’s really something to think about, gym owners. As AI becomes a larger and larger thing, we’ve talked about this on the Two-Brain blog. You can check that out if you want. There’s a whole series on AI and gyms, marketing systems and AI and all those things. However, you are not looking for in the microgym industry, 4,000 clients, right? You’re looking for about 150. Maybe more, but you’re looking for these perfect high value people who wanna stay for years and you wanna build personal relationships with them. You’re going to stand out from the crowd by starting that right on the first second that they’re a lead. Within the first five minutes rather than bombarding them with automations. Now, it’s not to say you can’t use automations in your systems, they totally work and they can streamline things, but I think Derek, correct me if I’m wrong here, when you started having a real person make these connections, you probably saw a better result, right?

Derek Batman: (18:04)
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, I would say that you measure your results as part of your lead nurture process by the amount. So how efficient your systems are, right? But also the amount of front end revenue that you’re generating, and then how long those people are sticking around because all those things can be different bottlenecks and different problems. And you have to diagnose them in different ways. But nonetheless, all those things can be problems, and you have a bunch of different things you may have to diagnose as part of the sales process or the lead nurture. But at the end of the day, your goal is ultimately to be able to waste less time with the wrong types of people and being able to provide as much value as possible to the people that are coming in, so that you can keep them longer and they ultimately influence your community in the ways that you want to maintain in your culture.

Mike Warkentin: (18:56)
I’ll ask you this question, feel free to not give me an exact answer if you don’t want to, but do you have a lot of members or female members? What are you looking at here for members, large numbers, small numbers, what do you want?

Derek Batman: (19:05)
What do I want or what do we have?

Mike Warkentin: (19:07)
What do you have? Yeah, and then essentially, I’m guessing that’s probably close to what you’re looking for, but give me an approximation here.

Derek Batman: (19:13)
So we’re floating around 160 members right now. This is probably a high point for us, but the climb has come by the way of a lot of little bit up, a little bit down, little bit more up a little bit down. I am not looking for any sort of a massive influx of members, not because our systems couldn’t handle it, but because I feel like it would be difficult for me to believe that those would be the types of people that would wanna stay around. And I may be proven wrong in that regard, but I have found that the best way to do it the way we’re doing it, which is offering a higher value service, is to be much more careful as part of the onboarding process and making sure we’re able to deliver as much value as possible and vet out the right people for the building.

Derek Batman: (20:00)
We have a large facility, we have about 9,500 square feet, so that allows us to have multiple different offerings. This high ticket offering comes by the way of sports performance. People that want personal training for a variety of different reasons. Maybe it’s some sort of rehabilitation or kind of getting back to the sport that they want. Maybe it’s more aesthetics based. So we do offer quite a variety of services, but in all of them, the goal at the end of the day is value. I want to over deliver on everything that we do.

Mike Warkentin: (20:31)
And you can do that with 150, 160 members. Chris has written about this a bunch of times, 150, 160. You can maintain personal relationships with that group pretty well. When you start getting to the 200 range, things start to get frazzled. You start to forget people’s occupations and things. If your gym systems aren’t right up to snuff, you’re gonna have some issues. That’s not to say you can’t go further, but you could also make a really great living serving 150 to 160 high value clients. And Derek is proof of that. Derek, are you satisfied with that number of booked deployments or do you wanna see that again next month or more? And then I’ll ask you, what are you doing now to improve set and close rates? Or show and close rates, pardon me.

Derek Batman: (21:09)
I mean, I always wanna see an increase in those numbers at the end of the day. I think that that’s indicative of the staff’s ability to be able to take the lead nurture from start to finish, and be able to complete in a way that makes those people want to then have their friends come on board. The referrals are really, really good in that regard. And then obviously my GM’s ability to take in the leads that I’m able to get her and be able to effectively get them in the door. And then on my end, it comes by the way of continuing to refine the marketing messaging in a way that attracts the right people. So I think it’s not one person in this equation, it’s the whole team. So we meet about this regularly and we have these conversations so that everyone understands what the mission is and why we’re going after the people we are. I would say we’re happy with where we are, but we’re always looking to get better. But we’re not looking to get better at the expense of the goal.

Mike Warkentin: (22:08)
Right, right. Who does the sales? Is that you or is it someone else?

Derek Batman: (22:11)
So my GM does about 90% or so of the sales. Okay. If there’s any that are additional, I take them. And our youth coach will occasionally take some of the kids, or at least their parents because of the fact that we allow them to come in for a free class. So a lot of times the consult just naturally takes place after the, the class.

Mike Warkentin: (22:32)
And do you train your staff on how to sell and make sure that they know exactly how to do it? Like using a sales binder or any of the other things that would really help?

Derek Batman: (22:39)
Yeah, so we’ve gone through a number of iterations with a sales binder, and now we actually do it through a presentation on an iPad. Very cool.

Mike Warkentin: (22:48)
That works well.

Derek Batman: (22:49)
For sure. Yeah. We found that it’s clean, it’s organized. It allows everything to take place on one screen. And then I personally in sales, like to have a clipboard with a piece of paper so I can draw. I feel like visuals really help throughout that process. We have gone through the painstaking process of doing sales roleplay, and I can tell everyone that while it is incredibly awkward in the very beginning, it does help. It does help. So if you’re on the fence about doing it, set time with your staff and it’s awkward at first and then it gets kind of funny and then eventually everyone kind of catches on. And then when people are able to take those lessons outside of the role play that you’re doing and utilize them in a sales setting, and they work and you start to see the validity in them, then all of a sudden the light bulb goes off and you’re like, okay, cool. We need to do this more often.

Mike Warkentin: (23:40)
Sales skills are not, you’re not born with them. They can be trained and if you don’t know how to sell at your gym, find someone to teach you or hire a salesperson who’s very good at it. Two-Brain has systems that will teach you how to close sales. So if you’re interested in that, a mentor can help you. Derek, sending people out the door here, I’ll say it, you tell me if I’m right or not. If people can go out of this podcast and do one thing today to increase their set rate, I’m guessing based on our conversation, that it would be to respond to leads faster. Would you agree or do you have a different tip for them?

Derek Batman: (24:11)
I would agree. I would say respond faster and be a real person.

Mike Warkentin: (24:16)
Yeah, I like that too. Because in the age of automated marketing, now you can start to sniff when it’s not a real person, a real person is gonna stand out from the crowd and I think you’re gonna probably get more appointments and ultimately more close sales. Derek, thanks so much for sharing your time with us. I appreciate it. I can’t wait to see you back on the leaderboard next month.

Derek Batman: (24:31)
Absolutely, Mike, it’s been fun.

Mike Warkentin: (24:33)
That was Derek Batman. This is Run a Profitable Gym. Please hit subscribe on the way out, wherever you are watching or listening. Now, here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.

Chris Cooper: (24:42)
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 34 Free Consultations in One Month: The December Leaderboard appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

By the Numbers: Getting More Clients—Close Rate

Remember when you opened your gym and every person who came through the door was already sold on your service?

In fact, if those early adopters didn’t sign up, it was because you basically turned them away, right?

Yeah, those days are gone.

When you run ads on any platform, you attract strangers to your gym. That’s great—you wouldn’t have met these people without your ads. On the other hand, they don’t know much about you yet. So many won’t sign up—unless you’re good at selling them on your coaching.

Your close rate is the number of prospects who sign up for your service when they show up to appointments.

Below, you’ll see the numbers for the top gyms in the world. The gyms that closed the most sales—28 apiece—closed in 88 and 90 percent of appointments. The next two gyms closed in 66 percent of appointments, and the one after that closed in 90 percent of appointments. One gym went 18 for 18!

Top Lessons From the Leaders

Here’s how these gym owners do it:

“We encouraged them to join in 2022 because in 2023 rates were increasing. This hasn’t dampened the signups: 13 so far in January!”

“We hired a new person that we put in charge of sales. She’s part-time client success manager and sales, and she’s been working out really well.”

“We prequalified the leads—how? Doing calls to prequalify them. That’s why we are able to close at such a high rate. We use the free trials as a softer sale. We would always offer an initial phone call, and the goal of that call is to book a trial class. Most will do this unless they want to meet first. After the free class, they finish the workout and meet with the coach or now the new salesperson. They’ll speak with the person and get them signed up. Before they come in for the free class, they have filled out the consent form and the membership agreement.” 

“We just built a brand new gym. On the second floor there is a big office for NSIs (No Sweat Intros), with windows looking out onto the gym floors and a hallway with progress photos on the way to that NSI office. The pricing binder is set up the ‘car wash’ way: good, better and best packages. Basic, Committed, Determined.”

“I always hit the core values of the gym in the NSI—help first, progression, community (and I get to talk about our community events, which keeps them engaged and on the radar).”

“We added the NSI and on-ramp (by PT sessions—6, 8, 12 sessions). Before Two-Brain we used free trials, so the big difference now is that we earn a lot more because now folks pay $400-$700 to start with us. Now we have less attrition with this system.”

“We made an NSI script sheet for me, my partner and the coach to follow. But basically we just try to be personal, appeal to the mom’s self-care needs—we dig a little deeper. My coach is so personable and makes them feel comfortable.”

And here’s what a few other top gym owners said about close rate in the past:

“I just make the decision for them and tell them the price.”

“We just do the NSI exactly as (Two-Brain Business) teaches it. Some clients have told me they were shopping around and this was way different than the other places. … They were overwhelmed at the other places and say that I care and give thought to their path. I try to empathize with where they’re at in their journey, then follow through with a prescription.”

“I spent time teaching my staff to sell NSIs.”

“Our close rate has been getting better as we got more quality leads.”

“We do a deep dive into motivation. Clients who have done intros or trials at other gyms sign up right away. They all say, ‘None of the others asked me these questions.'”

Closing Secrets

The keys to getting people to sign up? Care and clarity.

Care enough to go deep: Ask what they really want and ask why.

Be clear: Tell them exactly what they need to achieve their specific goals. Remove complexity. You don’t have to explain CrossFit to them or show them your equipment. You don’t have to worry about their reaction to your pricing. Just tell them the solution and what it will cost.

It will take courage at first. But you’ll build confidence. And when you do—well, we’ll see you on the leaderboard!

The post By the Numbers: Getting More Clients—Close Rate appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

By the Numbers: Getting More Clients—Show Rate

If you want to get people into your program, you need to get them through the door first.

Especially with cold traffic from advertising, up to 50 percent of the people who book free intro consultations at your gym might not show up. Though it’s hard to believe, more and more people book appointments they don’t keep. That’s aggravating, but you can improve your numbers.

In this post, I’m going to tell you how the top gyms in the world get people to show up for their appointments. Your “show rate” is the number of people who book and keep their appointments.

Below are the 10 gyms that had the most clients show up for appointments in December 2022. The No. 1 gym saw 33 of 46 clients who booked appointments—72 percent. The No. 2 gym went 32 for 34—94 percent. The No. 3 gym batted a thousand—31 for 31!

Top Lessons From the Leaders

“Depending on how far out the consult is booked, we’ve structured the automations with additional touch points. Before Kilo, we maybe called once; now it’s like clockwork.”

“We use Kilo and follow up with a call for every lead. There is an SMS that says ‘someone will contact you soon,’ and then I call them to schedule a time for the NSI. Then the day before they come, they get a text reminder.”

“We quickly reach out, within at least a day by phone call. If they don’t answer, we call them again.”

“After they book an NSI, we’re looking to get the NSIs done ASAP. For confirmation, the coach sends a video of themselves, then a text reminder the night before, then another three hours before.”

“Our lead nurture is really strong. We do a good job of making sure they are reminded of the appointment. We send a video via text of what happens when you walk through the door: ‘Here’s the expectations’ and all of that, which impacts the willingness of someone to actually show up for the appointment.”

Here’s what a few other top gym owners had to say about show rate:

“Our show rate has improved with less dependency on automations. In the past quarter, I’ve been sending video messages personally, and these have gotten a higher response and show rate than automated emails did.”

“We have a front desk person who doesn’t sit idle; they own the sales process, calling leads, following up.”

“Texts get read more than email. We increased the use of appt. reminders through text.”

“We ask them a lot of questions to keep the conversation going between when they set their appointment and when they actually show up.”

“We really hold their hand through every step of the process—from booking an appointment to showing up until their first training session.”

“When a client books an appointment with you, it’s not an automatic sale. They’re really just raising their hand and saying, ‘I want help.’ Consider them a warm lead. Take them by the hand, guide them step by step through your door, and then begin the process that will change their life.”

Podcast: “Why Everyone Shows up for Free Intros With Pep Leppers.”

The post By the Numbers: Getting More Clients—Show Rate appeared first on Two-Brain Business.