Chris Cooper's Blog, page 98

How to Sell More Gym Memberships: The 2022 Guide

If you’re a gym owner, you must learn how to sell more gym memberships. It’s the key to your success as an entrepreneur.

If you don’t work on sales, you can have an impressive operation with super coaches and still not seal the deal with enough prospective members to generate the revenue you need. Fortunately, we have ideas and techniques you can adopt to get more of your gym’s first-time visitors to become new members.

Below, we’ll share some great advice with you on how to sell a gym membership and answer some questions you might have about the processes used to sell more gym memberships.

Sell More Gym Memberships: Coaching or Access?

The most essential element of selling more gym memberships is focus. So before you develop or implement any new sales tactics, you must decide whether you are selling access to your gym or selling coaching.

Internet trading platforms and apps have given more people access to trading stocks and bonds without the guidance of a broker or advisor. Selling gym access is like similar: You allow clients to use your space and equipment for a monthly fee. Clients come and go as they please and do their own routines. In this model, you’re looking for hundreds and even thousands of clients at lower rates—perhaps $20-$50 per month. It’s a volume game, and client results aren’t your primary concern.

When you follow a coaching model, delivering results is critical, and you charge more for high-touch services that produce them. Value is more important than volume. Satisfied members who reach their goals will stick around longer and recommend your gym to their family, friends and business associates.

In this model, common starting points are 150 clients who each pay an average of $205 per month for nutrition, personal training and group fitness coaching, not just facility access. Some coaching gyms have average monthly rates over $300.

Target Markets and Strategic Advantages

As you can see, different clients are attracted to different kids of gyms, and your model will affect your marketing.

In short, you must know exactly what you are selling before you can sell more gym memberships. Once you know what you’re selling, you can define your target market and strategic advantages.

For example, an access-only gym with a daycare service might target busy parents who would jump at the chance to have their kids supervised while they do a workout. A coaching facility might target local professionals who want to lose weight and gain strength while working with a personal coach or in a small, trainer-led group.

The access facility wins if parents buy memberships and keep dropping their kids off to train. The coaching gym wins if high-value clients actually lose weight and get stronger. Both models can work, but the “perfect clients” for the first gym will be different from those the second gym will work to acquire.

How Affinity Marketing Can Improve Your Lead Flow

Leads are the key to selling new memberships, and successful gym owners closely monitor these three metrics:

Set rate—the number of leads scheduled for a free consultation or No Sweat Intro.Show rate: the number of leads who show up for appointments.Close rate: the number of leads that show up and become members.

Advertising, promotional events and social media are suitable methods of generating leads. But Affinity Marketing leads are the cheapest and most convertible of all because they come to your gym through referrals from present gym members. These leads are often the gym member’s relatives, friends, acquaintances or business associates. Because the referring members have already hyped your gym, your good reputation and positive image precede you.

Your challenge is to get more of these very warm leads.

Get the “Affinity Marketing Guide” in our Free Tools package.

Getting More High-Affinity Leads With the Prescriptive Model

In coaching gym, your gym’s primary currency with clients is results. Your clients invest their money in you in exchange for help reaching their health and fitness goals. When they achieve success, you should have a pumped-up advocate who is eager to praise you to their friends, family and acquaintances. This can set you up to sell more gym memberships. But you must help your clients get results.

So the million-dollar question is, “What is the best way to help your clients get clear results?”

Our answer is to use the “Prescriptive Model” as a goal-setting, evaluating and coaching tool.

Can the prescriptive model work in an access-only gym? Yes—but it would be streamlined and tailored to recognize that prospective clients are looking for a low-touch service. In that scenario, a salesperson would still find out about the client and make a prescription, but it might just be “buy a monthly membership and sign up for an additional group step session each week.”

Below, we’ll present the full plan, and it can be adjusted if your access gym doesn’t offer goal reviews, which are essential in coaching gyms.

Inside the Prescriptive Model

The structure of the Prescription Model is simple because it starts with determining the clients’ goal—designated as “Point B.” Then you, the expert coach, establish a starting point—”Point A.” Within these points established, you can plot a path backward from Point B to Point A.

Use your expertise and experience to prescribe the best course of action clients can take to reach their goals.

For example, suppose you have a client whose goal is to reach 12 percent body fat from 24 percent body fat. In that case, your prescription might be an alternating schedule of personal coaching involving low-intensity interval training (LIIT) and high-intensity interval training (HIIT) five times a week, complemented by a habit-based nutrition plan designed to manage snacking, reduce added sugar and increase vegetable intake.

This is “selling” in the fitness industry: presenting the best solution to a problem or the shortest path to a goal.

Adjusting and Tracking Progress

After presenting your prescription, you’ll have objections to consider. Address issues by reminding the client about the importance of the goals, building value and adjusting the prescription if needed.

In our example, you could change the combination of routines, the number of days or the diet plan. Or you could offer the service in a group setting instead of one on one. If the prospective clients can move toward their goals with the adjusted plan, you’ll have a prescription that pleases and motivates them.

By establishing benchmarks along the way, you can motivate them by congratulating them at, say, four weeks completed, eight weeks completed, etc. Or perhaps when they drop 2, 4 or 6 lb. of fat. It is essential to track your clients’ progress toward their goals, make necessary adjustments and offer expert guidance. To keep the prescription on target, the best gyms hold an assessment session every three months to make any significant changes.

At its core, the Prescriptive Model is a goal-oriented, client-centered approach to helping clients achieve their goals. It offers two opportunities:

1. Sell to the client by prescribing the best solution to the problem.

2. With satisfied clients, acquire leads and referrals (Affinity Marketing).

How to Turn Leads Into Members

Whether you’re dealing with cold leads or referrals, your opportunity to sell starts as soon as you obtain contact information. Nurturing leads is an art in and of itself, so we’ll just say that new leads should be contacted as quickly as possible by phone, text and email. Your goal: Get the person to respond and book a consultation. If you don’t make contact, you must keep trying and eventually feed the contact info into your automated long-term nurturing sequences.

For more on that topic, check out “How to Get Gym Leads” from the experts at Gym Lead Machine.

Protip: If you succeed in getting a lead to book an appointment, be sure to send confirmations and reminders. Doing so will increase the chances that the person will show up.

Once a person arrives at your gym, each encounter is an opportunity to sign up a new member and sharpen your sales skills.

In a sales meeting with a prospective client, gather as much information as you can so you can offer solutions to problems.Getting to Know Your Prospect

Having top-notch facilities is a powerful asset. But it is not the primary catalyst in selling more memberships. Instead, prioritize your connection to your guest and gather as much information as you can. You must find out what they want to do and why. The “what” allows you to prescribe the correct services, and the “why” will help you overcome objections and make the sale. You should collect all the prospective member’s information on your intro form.

Remember, it’s not about you. It’s about them. Listen more than you talk, and ask lots of questions. For example, “Why do you want to lose 10 pounds?” or, “What would it mean to your family if you improved your fitness?” Try to discover the emotional connections to the goals.

This process will work in access gyms, too. Perhaps a client who just wanted a membership will purchase additional services, supplements or equipment if you dig a little and present solutions to problems.

When meeting with leads, dig to acquire this critical info:

Exercise experience: favorite exercise forms and training styles, dislikes, previous gym memberships, previous successes, reasons for quitting, etc.Goals and measures of success: essential for you to make a prescription and track progress.Motivation: factors and people involved, commitment levels, decision-making priorities.Barriers to success: the things that can cause the person to leave without joining or quit the gym after joining.

In some cases, it’s wise to include a free workout or tour in your consultation. But don’t let that become the focus, and don’t let the person leave without a sales conversation. You must find out about goals and offer a prescription! We recommend you write that prescription down and present the prices to the client with a sales binder or iPad.

If the client signs up, that’s a win. Get the person into your on-ramp/intro program ASAP.

If the client raises objections, you’ll have to address them. Remember: The client came to you to solve a problem. You’re not being pushy. You’re helping the client by offering solutions.

Here’s a video that will help you solve problems for clients:

We’ll cover sales training and more objections below.

Converting More Leads by Becoming a Better Salesperson

There are some basic things you can do to improve your chances of making the sale.

First, body language and appearance are essential in conveying that you are confident and trustworthy. Dress like a “fitness pro,” and wear branded apparel. Smile and be very friendly. Work to set people at ease—many will be nervous. In addition, giving your visitors your full attention is imperative, meaning you should mute your cell phone and your eyes should be on your prospective member. Meetings should take place in clean, organized sales office.

Here are some points of focus:

1. Along with discovering their goals, try to find the emotion fueling your prospect’s drive to reach them. Maybe it’s the fear of having a heart attack or a strong desire to make lifestyle changes due to a significant upcoming life event, like a wedding. If a person isn’t ready to commit, reminding them of their goals and why they are important can save the sale.

2. Another effective technique is asking questions that generate “yes answers” for most of the meeting until you ask for the sale. For example, you could ask questions like:

Do you like that you won’t have to wait for equipment to be free here?Given your busy schedule, do you like our new expanded hours?So you’re saying that weight loss is most important to you?

3. You can also strengthen your pitch with an “option close.” Here are two examples:

“So would you prefer to train one on one with me or in a group?”“I can see you’re into group training. Of our platinum and gold packages, which option works best for you?”

Here are two more videos with sale tips to help gym owners sell more memberships:

How to Sell More Memberships by Dealing With Roadblocks

As you hone your sales technique, the entire process will go more smoothly, and you will start to sell more gym memberships.

A servant/leader mindset will help you stay in the mode of assisting people to reach their goals and prosper. Most people instinctually know when someone is coming from a place of care instead of a place of self-benefit, and the book “Help First” will help you take the right approach.

Due to technological advances, the average person receives or views 4,000-10,000 sales messages a day. As a result, most people automatically detect a sales pitch and immediately put up a rejection screen. Keeping this in mind will help you show genuine care for a person’s needs, and it will help you sell more gym memberships.

However, even on your most smokin’ days, you might encounter roadblocks with a potential client that can confound you if you’re not ready to overcome them. So, let’s examine these potential membership sales problems so you can learn how to deal with them. Remember: If you don’t overcome the roadblocks, the prospective client will leave and miss out on a chance to dramatically improve health and fitness.

Grab another staff member and do some sales role playing today, and you’ll make more sales tomorrow.Sell More Gym Memberships with Role-Playing Practice

If you suffer from fear of rejection or feel insecure in your sales abilities, a jittery intro meeting can hamper your membership sales effort. However, Michael Jordan once said, “Being nervous isn’t bad. It just means something important is happening.”

The best way to harness your nervous energy is to develop a sales rhythm through repetition and practice. As mentioned earlier, the only way to ingrain a habit is to repeat it thousands of times. Therefore, role-playing intro sessions over and over will pay dividends.

Your actions and reactions are critically important during the intro, so it’s good to rehearse your presentation and the questions you ask prospective gym members. The more “reps” you get, the better you’ll perform when a real prospective client is in your office.

All you need is a friend or associate to play the role of the buyer. Before the drill starts, your partner must assume the role of the potential member, portraying someone who is in your target market.

During the role-playing sessions, you should focus on your weakest areas. For example, if you are a weak closer, you should concentrate on improving in that area. It also helps if your “buyer” is prepared to offer a number of common objections, either in the same consultation or by taking on a new persona for another intro session.

Role playing is an excellent low-pressure method to help you overcome your lack of confidence in conducting and closing membership sales activities on the way to increased revenue. The more your practice, the more prepared you’ll be. And when you’re prepared, you’ll be able to smoothly work with the potential client to find solutions.

Overcoming Budgetary Objections

The most common objections often relate to price or budget:

“It’s too expensive.”“I can’t afford it.”“’I can’t pay for it right now.”

Do these responses seem familiar? You might have used them a few times yourself.

There are some practical ways to address these price- and budget-related statements. The first thing: Do not overreact to an objection. Stay calm. If you’ve practiced dealing with price objections during role playing—highly recommended—it will be easy to keep your emotions in check.

Practice will supply you with a tactful script for the price objection, which will improve the quality of your response and drive up your close rate. You should also have a plan for other common objections, such as “I have to ask my spouse,” “I’ll come back later” and “I need to think about it.”

When prospects say the price is too high, they are really comparing your gym to another. Find out what gym they are comparing yours to. When you find out, you can point out the advantages your gym has over the other without criticizing or tearing it down. The goal is to build value around your business, and in many cases you’ll have to educate the client.

For example, salespeople at coaching gyms often get a price objection because leads are used to hearing pitches for $30-a-month rates at access-only gyms. In this scenario, the salesperson must explain how the two types of gyms differ.

Regardless of the objection, you can use this process to frame your response:

Acknowledge with empathy: ”Thank you for letting me know how you feel.”Ask a question that leads to the sale: “What other gyms are you comparing us to?”Engage in a strategy session with them to produce a solution: “How important is personalized coaching to you?”

To make this process work, you must know your competition, their price structure and everything they have to offer. You must also know your own strategic advantages. Then you can combine all that knowledge with the personal information you gained earlier in the meeting to point out how your gym can help them reach their goals.

Here’s another video resource for you:

Sell More Gym Memberships: FAQs

Q: Is there such a thing as an “unqualified lead?”

A: Just because a lead walks out of your gym without signing up does not mean that person is an unqualified lead. The fitness industry has done a terrific job of using mass and electronic media to make consumers fully aware of what gyms offer. So when most leads enter your gym, they know what they are looking for in a fitness facility. So why did they leave without buying?

We are not mind readers, and we can never truly know why people make their decisions, even when they provide a reason. It is best to look at each unsigned lead as an opportunity to learn from the questions they asked, their demeanor and other clues they supplied. That review will help you improve your skills so you can close your next lead.

Q: Could it be that I’m just a lousy salesperson?

A: You might be surprised, but this thought enters the minds of many people in business. Usually, this thought process stems from FEAR—false evidence that appears real. Having a string of lost sales doesn’t mean you’re a lousy salesperson. Instead, it probably means you haven’t found your rhythm yet.

When you practice your sales craft in role playing, it’s good to have a third person critique your delivery to pinpoint the areas you need to improve. But most importantly, ditch the salesperson label and envision yourself as an empathetic servant leader prepared to assist your prospective members in reaching their goals. Think of it as “helping,” not selling.

Q: When talking to a potential client, what’s the most important thing to focus on?

To sell more gym memberships, you should focus on what your leads want and why they need it. This focus will help you close sales and create a long-term bond with your client. That can produce better results for them and high retention rates for you.

Q: Do I have to assemble the most knowledgeable coaches to succeed?

Having a team of highly credentialed and knowledgeable coaches is terrific. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll sell more memberships. According to Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper, relying solely on technical prowess to make your gym a success is a mistake because “credentials don’t sell. Conversations do.”

Regardless of your expertise, you and your staff must connect with prospective clients and offer the things they care about: solutions to problems and progress toward goals. Your knowledge, technical ability and credentials are valuable only in solving clients’ problems, not in closing sales. Getting your clients results is always the bottom line in selling more gym memberships and retaining members. And remember, retention requires “re-selling,” so work hard to prove your value every day.

Q: Is it enough to be a great coach? If I “build it,” will they come?

No. This common advice is false. You must learn to market and sell to run a successful business. The good news: You can learn.

Coffee is for closers—like you!How to Sell More Gym Memberships: Key Takeaways

Selling more gym memberships is not a complicated task when you approach it with the right frame of mind and preparation.

As gym owners, you aren’t selling lemons off the used-car lot or peddling useless gimmicks. So you don’t have to feel slimy. You’re helping people improve their health and fitness, and you deserve to be compensated for that valuable service. Focus on helping and you’ll feel much better at sales.

Then invest time in practicing. There’s no substitute for reps. Get as many as you can so you’re ready when it gets real in the sales office.

Remember: Your gym won’t fill itself. You have to sell. And we can teach you how to do it.

To learn more about mentorship, click here.

About the Author: John Burson successful ran a personal training business for over 20 years, and he has written volumes of published articles on business entrepreneurship, finance, and the fitness industry.

The post How to Sell More Gym Memberships: The 2022 Guide appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How This Gym Owner Added 80 Clients in 30 Days

Mike (00:02):

80 new clients after working with a mentor, this number can’t be right. Can it? Dane, is this number right?

Dane (00:08):

It is right. Fortunately. Yes. It’s very correct.

Mike (00:12):

I need to hear the story. And so do our listeners. This is Two-Brain Radio. I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. Please subscribe and hit like wherever you are watching or listening. Now. Dane McCarthy is my guest. He runs West Village Athletic he’s in New York City in Manhattan, not far from the Empire State Building. So without further ado, we’re gonna get right into it because I know you wanna know the answer that I wanna know also. Dan, how did you add 80 new clients in 30 days?

Dane (00:38):

Yeah, we really just followed the Two-Brain formula. I had a really great mentor Russell, and one of the most valuable

Mike (00:45):

It’s Russell Francis.

Dane (00:46):

Francis. Yeah. Yep. And one of the first things we did, I think the second week was develop a sales playbook, that clearly articulated what we sell and why we sell it. And, put that into, I think we call the sales binder, create a sales binder, and followed the process. We created no sweat intros. We called them just intros, ran our clients through, the binder and had incredible success.

Mike (01:13):

So this was all through the Two-Brain Rampup program and if so, when did you start that?

Dane (01:18):

Right. Started the rampup program, late last year, but really only in anger, kind of in the start of the new year.

Mike (01:31):

Tell me why in anger. I’m gonna ask that one.

Dane (01:33):

Like I think, I think I signed up to Two-Brain thinking, you know, there’ll be some good tidbits in there and they’ll throw me some content that I could use. I wasn’t expecting the breadth of information and the seriousness to which I had to kind of apply myself to implementing it. So when I kind of grasped that there was some real actions and I had to implement serious changes to the gym, that’s when I started seeing real results when I started really implementing the changes.

Mike (02:02):

Yeah. And one of the reasons I wanted to get you on the show is that Chris Cooper and the Two-Brain staff are always improving our program. So rampup, which used to be called incubator, has evolved. And now it’s designed to be a very swift sprint, which you’ve experienced and to get some action and some wins right away. So in 30 days you got 80 new clients, you know, which is incredible. As you were seeing this happen what was your thought process? Like what was your brain seeing? Like I’ve never got any clients in a year, let alone a month.

Dane (02:30):

Yeah. I mean, I was shocked like, cuz the way we were doing it is we were just sending broad messages out through Instagram, to people being like, Hey, would you like to join the gym? And then we’d provide a link to sign up directly, you know, from our Instagram or our website. And what that did is it took, it meant that we didn’t have control over the process. We were just kind of sending things out and hoping it’d stick. And it did, it got us to 50 70 clients. But having a direct call to action that resulted in a call that allowed us to properly articulate our value proposition and explain why we thought it was a really good thing for these people who were interested, was really just a tipping point. And then as soon as that happened, we just started closing members, really frequently.

Mike (03:16):

So that was a switch in your intake process. Like what did you do before as opposed to a consultation or an introduction? Yeah.

Dane (03:24):

Before we were just posting on Instagram and then we had really convoluted website where they would go to the website, they had to select, which squad and we can talk about how we’re a little bit different in our training style, but they had to go and select their squad, click into it and then buy on mind body. There was no one really holding their hand or guiding them. So I think people go on the website, they’re a little bit confused. They didn’t really understand why we were different. But it was working. So I didn’t really think that it could do any better, you know? Until I sat with Russell and he kind of was like, well maybe there’s a different way of doing that.

Mike (04:01):

You know, your experience isn’t that different from mine because back, you know, I started my gym, I think in 2010 we had a similar thing. We had a, you know, confusing website, too many options, too many things where people would just show up and we weren’t doing any advertising or outreach at that point. This was early on when there were only a few CrossFit gyms, right. So we would just like expect people to find us, which they did. And then they would click through our convoluted website and they would maybe sign up or they would call us or something like that. But we didn’t have that process put in place, that process of sitting down with people and saying, what are you interested in? What are your goals? What do you need? And then giving them a plan in that no sweat intro or free consultation model. It really helped us A diversify, our revenue streams, where some people wanted personal training, some wanted nutrition, some wanted both, some wanted group. And then the other thing it did is it really allowed us to, you know, tailor our service to their goals and build the value proposition, which helped us close more sales. So is that kind of the same experience that you had almost word for word?

Dane (04:56):

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And a really important part of that was the sales binder, going through that exercise. Like the binder is what the binder is, but going through the exercise of putting down on paper what is it that we’re selling and why is it valuable was a really good exercise for myself. And my coaches. They were the ones who took the calls and did the great job on bringing members on. And they could only do that because we had clearly articulated what we were selling.

Mike (05:23):

OK.

Mike (05:25):

And what Dane’s talking about here, listeners, is the sales binder or pricing binder, whatever you wanna call it is, a booklet, or it can be an iPad presentation that you use to guide people through these consultation processes. And it lays out your offers very clearly. It helps you showcase your value and it’s not a gigantic 30 page thing. It’s very short, very concise and very pointed. And the act of putting it together, which we lead you through in ramp up, will help you clarify what you are actually selling. Because a lot of people, oddly enough, don’t actually know. I thought I was selling fitness and CrossFit and sweat and vomit. When in fact I was actually selling coaching. And when you start to realize that, your value goes up and you can ask people for $300 a month, not just 79.99 for equipment access and so forth. So, we’re gonna dig into this stuff a little bit more, but tell me a little bit about the history of your gym, how long you’ve been around, what’s your deal? What’s what kind of training styles do you do? Give me the backstory.

Dane (06:17):

Yeah, great. No, I appreciate giving that opportunity. So we started, West Village Athletic kind of during the pandemic. A bunch of Australian expats, all working full time, and were just a bit lonely. So we started working out together, outdoors and the insight we had when training here in the US is that the training style’s great. It’s intense, it’s fun. It’s really entertaining. But in some cases it’s quite transactional. So what we did is we tried to emulate the training style, which we have back at home, back in Australia, which is you train with your 10, 15 closest mates. So what makes us different is when you joined WVA, you join a training squad, you join, that squad twice a week. you have a dedicated coach that oversees the progress of the squad itself and the members within it. And, why we think that’s so valuable is it gives people an opportunity to get to know the people they’re training with, you know, become accountable to one another enjoy training, and kinda get more from just the training than the physical, but also the holistic mental and social elements as well.

Mike (07:22):

Does that come from a military background or is that, something you guys came up with outside that?

Dane (07:27):

No, certainly not military. I played rugby back at home. So really that’s just how we trained when we were training rugby. And I think a lot of people in America can relate to that because there’s a lot of college athletes, lot of high school sports. People finish. And they’re like, now what, you know, I haven’t got a group of people to train with anymore. I haven’t got a team. so it’s certainly just a lift and shift from my rugby days, to be honest.

Mike (07:49):

And so you opened during the pandemic in 2020?

Dane (07:53):

Yep. That’s right.

Mike (07:54):

In Manhattan no less. So there’s a bit of pressure on you probably financially. I’m guessing.

Dane (07:58):

Yeah, it was scary leap to take. I mean, this is certainly not my full-time job. I have a full-time job that I love and I work at, what we did is we, there was a place that was going under, just during the pandemic. We were able to negotiate a really good lease to maintain it as a gym. So we took that over and we started very small scale. Our squads were five people, deliberately so that we could contact trace. And then as COVID restrictions started to lift, we got the squads built out a little bit more and we hired coaches and a general manager who runs the day to day of the gym.

Mike (08:34):

You do PT as well or nutrition, or is it just these squads?

Dane (08:41):

Yeah, this was another thing that I got from Two-Brain. I mean, our revenue stream was really one dimensional. We were just selling these squads, as part of the sales binder process, we added PT and I was honestly really like, I don’t know, it’s not really our thing. And we sold a whole lot of those and it’s because people are looking for it, you know, they’re looking for more personalized training. And so by offering that, we brought on five or six as part of those 80 members, PT, which diversified our revenue stream completely.

Mike (09:13):

I imagine that in your area, you know, busy Manhattan people, there’s probably a convenience factor that appeals to the PT crowd where it’s like, I can’t make that squad, but do you have a slot at, you know, 2:00 PM on Wednesday? Right?

Dane (09:24):

Yeah. Spot on, spot on. Yeah. And then there’s other people who have come out of the pandemic who were, you know, they just fell behind a little bit in their fitness routines. Yeah. And they were looking for, a bit of a jumpstart in their trainings. We had a lot of people really successfully do some PT, kinda get to a level where they felt comfortable to jump in with the squad.

Mike (09:40):

So we talked a little bit about this earlier and you said there was some anger, which I thought was hilarious, but tell me more about why you decided to do the ramp up. And what was the process like when you started up with Russell?

Dane (09:51):

Yeah, I mean, we decided to do the mentoring because, this isn’t my full-time job. And so I was really needing to be more efficient with managing the gym. Right. This was just before we had hired a GM. So my workload, the gym was increasing and I needed to kind of, be more efficient, so started looking around for help. And really, I was just intrigued by just getting access to France, Russell Francis, because he had been a similar thing. He’d worked full time in finance. And so, I was really just interested in the mentorship alone.

Mike (10:26):

He’s just over in Jersey, close to you guys.

Dane (10:28):

Right. That’s right. Yeah. And he’s got two gyms and he’s an expat as well. So I thought it would be great just to have a yarn to a bloke who’s done something similar, I think, full time when he started. So that was all, I was really interested in. It wasn’t until, I started speaking to the guys over there that I realized it was a bit more to it than just mentoring. And so that’s when I made a decision to jump on board.

Mike (10:51):

So at what point did you realize that this was working? Like, I obviously you’re selling memberships, but were there other points where you were like, aha. Cuz it’s not just like the ramp up is all about systems and staffing and everything, roles and procedures and tasks and some of the boring, like quote unquote making procedures and playbooks and things like that. There is some work involved, but at what point were you like, wow, this is a rocket ship and we’re moving now.

Dane (11:14):

Yeah. I think on that first one or two calls that we had. Where there was members who were looking for to join the gym. And I had such a clearly stated proposition. I was like, wow, OK. This is all I really needed to do. You know, we were doing so many good things, but we hadn’t packaged it or created a process to execute on it. And so it was kind of, well, before we signed 80, it was probably in the first five that I was like, yeah. OK. This is just the consolidation that I needed of all the things that we were already doing.

Mike (11:47):

Do you have any other metrics that you wouldn’t mind sharing? Is there anything else besides the 80 members that you’ve mentioned, you added some staff members and things like that, what else you got?

Dane (11:55):

Yeah. Well diversifying our revenue was really important. Making sure that we were getting, providing more value to our members across different services.

Mike (12:10):

That’s average revenue per member per month for, listeners that’s ARM, as we refer to it. And a bigger number is better both usually for the client and the gym because the client is getting healthier, faster.

Dane (12:19):

That’s right. So our top line grew significantly. Russell really challenged me on our price point, unsurprisingly, well, we started outdoor training and it was a bunch of mates really just mucking around, you know? So our price point was really just a cover costs of hiring a PT to train us. so we were very low and the first thing Russell did was that OK, the new members that you bring on, let’s change that price point so that you can be sustainable going forward, pay your coaches more and make sure the gym lasts.

Mike (12:46):

How much did you add to the price?

Dane (12:48):

$20.

Mike (12:49):

$20. And, was it a difficult sell for you in your mind? Cuz some gym owners, when they do a price increase, they’re like, wow, this is, I can’t sell this. Was it for you? Like difficult to do that? Or, and did you get some confidence when you made those sales or how’d that process go in your mind?

Dane (13:03):

Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, I certainly didn’t go for the rate that that was recommended by Russell and Two-Brain. I was still so nervous. That is so challenging, especially cuz we are mates with the guys that we started training with. Right. Yeah. So there’s that real personal thing that you’ve gotta kind of separate. And I think we’ve got a lot more upside there. In fact that is gonna be a big focus point for the next part of, the mentorship, the changing to 165. I think the process that was described by Russell was for your new members coming on, change the rate and see how it feels. So we managed to do that with all these new members. And then I think we’ll probably have to do a rate rate hike at some point, just so that we can sustain.

Mike (13:46):

And that process has been tested and, you know, I’m sure Russell explained it to you, I’ll just give it to the listeners. But the reason why it’s like that is that when you raise the rates for new people coming in, there’s no fear, well, there’s less fear because they don’t know the rates are different. They just see the rates. And if you start making a few sales at those rates, which everyone does, because we all tend to undervalue ourselves, all of a sudden you realize people see the value. This is what it costs. They’re not telling me it’s too expensive. They realize that this is valuable. That gives you the confidence often to correct some errors. And I had to do this exact same thing because I priced myself way too low. That gives you the confidence to then correct it for your current members and often, and there is a step by step plan a mentor will guide you through, if you need to do that. And there is also a calculation where we have you do it in steps, if you need to go up a lot or in certain amounts. So it’s like, we don’t say, OK, double rates to a hundred, you know, $250 from 125 and lose all your members. It is not like that. There are some steps to that process. So that’s interesting. When are you thinking about doing that? Is that within this year?

Dane (14:48):

Yeah, I think so. I think we’ll need to kind of do it at the end of the year. And what I needed to get over was the mental hurdle. So in calculating the ARM, we really shone a light on my unit economics, and was it gonna be a viable gym, 10 years down the track.

Mike (15:05):

Right.

Dane (15:06):

When we went through that process, I realized, Hey, I won’t be able to service my clients if we don’t raise the rates and that’s a net loss for everyone involved. Yeah. So that going through the calculation of what is required to be sustainable gym was the most valuable process. Not necessarily the rate itself.

Mike (15:26):

Yeah. And it’s great that you’re talking about this stuff because when I started my gym and when others started theirs, they didn’t do any financial calculations. We kind of, I did something similar to you where I was working out with my buddies in the gym, right. Or in the garage, and then we started gym, but I didn’t really do those calculations and ask, can I sustain this long term? And it wasn’t until I realized I couldn’t, then I found Two-Brain that I made those corrections. So it’s great that you’re asking these questions now. Let me ask you this because like everyone knows Manhattan a is a crazy place in terms of rent and lease and all that stuff. How much space have you got there?

Dane (15:56):

Yeah, we’re small. We’ve got, about 1200 square feet.

Mike (16:00):

Yeah. OK. But it’s still Manhattan. So that carries a load to it and you’ve gotta pay the bills. So obviously there’s financial calculations. You’ve gotta make sure that you do them. Whereas, you know, where I was, it was a little easier because we had low rent in a warehouse district of a city that no one ever visits. So I was able to make a few more mistakes. So good for you for figuring, you know, sooner than I did.

Dane (16:20):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I read this from all around. Like it was quite comforting to know that in New York City, I was thinking, goodness, we’re gonna have to spend a whole lot of money on equipment. Now we’re gonna have to flashy lights and we’re gonna have to have influencers and all this kind of jazz and realize that that’s not what people are buying. You know, and I think that’s really clearly, stated in Two-Brain, is people are looking for coaching. They’re looking for companionship. They’re looking for accountability, whether or not you have 20 assault bikes or 10 doesn’t really matter, you know,

Mike (16:54):

Isn’t that a money saving realization, right? Where you’re like, I don’t have to blow a million dollars on all the stuff you mentioned. I just need and Chris has done this video where he is like, I need maybe a plyo box, maybe a barbell, maybe a skipping rope and a dumbbell or something. Obviously you can scale that out based on your model, but you can get effective results just with that. And then starting small, which Chris has also recommended, allows you to become profitable, hit break even, and then become profitable much faster then scale up. And if you need more space at that point, it’s not quite as scary. Right.

Dane (17:24):

Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, New York space is just such a valuable asset. Right. I would like to say we had the room to go and out all this equipment, we didn’t, like we can only have two bikes. So that’s what we’re gonna make do with.

Mike (17:39):

I’m waiting for someone to put a barge on the Hudson river and use that as a gym. Right. Just float that around. I’m sure the city’s figured out some way to permit the hell out of that.

Dane (17:48):

Heavy rent on it.

Mike (17:51):

But someone will do someday, hovering hovercraft or something to get around the municipal guidelines. Talk to me about implementation of changes in rampup, did you have to do any other stuff with like roles and tasks and staffing? And if so, like, how did the staff respond to that or to, you know, if you have coowners or partners, how did they respond to all these changes?

Dane (18:13):

Yeah. We did have to make some big changes there. I’ve always had someone running the gym and I’ve never actually, trained any classes just because at 8:00 AM, I have to clock off and do my full-time job. Yeah. So always had those roles in place, but never had roles, responsibilities, processes for ensuring that, we were delivering the product that we wanted to deliver. So we certainly did. And I think that was a lesson. I approached Two-Brain being like, oh, I’m gonna, I think I said to, Russell, I was like, oh, I’ll smash this out in two months and I’ll be ready to go. And he kind of just nodded. And I realized I had to slow it right down, like each week I kind of did over three weeks to make sure that I could implement.

Dane (18:58):

And we took big gaps between calls, just to make sure that I was getting the most value from those calls, because we had to create a sales binder, you know, that took me two weeks to do really properly because I had to really change my approach to selling, you know, that was a really, big one. And then also we had to come up with a playbook, a staff playbook, and that’s not a small task if you do it properly. Sure. You can throw some stuff on the paper, but if you take it seriously, it does take some time. So certainly had to slow things and really implement.

Mike (19:33):

Did you find that playbook to be a grind to create?

Dane (19:36):

Yeah. We use a software called Trainual and I just used all the content that was on Two-Brain and put it on Trainual, yeah. It made things so much easier, it’s great because it just made the process of, roles and responsibilities. Here’s a role. And then I just allocated it virtually to my staff, and then I can add stuff to that.

Mike (19:58):

That’s interesting. And the reason I ask if it’s a grind is because I know that roles and tasks are one of those things a lot of people avoid, it’s not sexy. It’s not sales, it’s not marketing, it’s not training. It’s not, you know, buying equipment. It’s one of those, like sitting down with, you know, a pen or, you know, a laptop or whatever, and grinding out who takes out the garbage at what time and you know, all the boring stuff. Right. But, you know, Chris Cooper has talked about this and it actually is 100% true. Even for those who don’t wanna admit it, the roles and tasks and systems, they’re the foundation of the business. You can’t do the sexy stuff without that basis. Like, did you find, once you had those roles and tasks in play, you had built this rock solid foundation that it allowed you to scale much faster.

Dane (20:37):

Yeah, absolutely. And I’m not gonna say that we’re there yet. You know, there’s still some work there and that’s an iterative process. I had to change my, like this whole experience. I had to change my mindset around it to get excited to do the playbook, because it is boring, you’re writing out roles and responsibilities and you’re writing out, OK, member comes into class. What do you need to do as soon as they come in, turn the lights on. So that was certainly a grind. But when I was like, OK, this is what’s gonna, there was one quote, you can, you can take a gym and you can buy a job or you can own a gym, you know? And I certainly can’t afford to buy a job cause I’ve already got one. You know? So when I was like, OK, this is great.

Dane (21:15):

I’m creating a proper gym here by having roles and responsibilities. And I got excited about it, and I was able to do it. So I changed the mindset was great. And then I also saved a lot of frustration I was having towards my staff, I was going like, why don’t they just do this? This is so annoying. Come in. And then I was like, when I was writing it out, the reason they’re not doing it is cause I’ve never told them that’s what I think’s important. So I was getting frustrated, then they didn’t know why I was getting frustrated. And it was just, it was a mirror that it got put up to me where I was like, then you gotta be a bit more, specific in what you’re asking.

Mike (21:51):

Yeah. And we, again, we’ve kinda led parallel lives where I had the same thing. I’ve always had a job when I had a business on the side. And so for me to offload tasks, I struggled with it and I did a poor job. And the reason was exactly what you said. I just assumed people would do it the way that I thought it should be done. So whenever there was a shortcoming, it was ultimately my fault because I hadn’t put a policy and procedure in place. And so I did the exact same exercise where I came up with this large staff manual that had everything where it’s like, you know, when you open the back door, be sure to unplug the alarm cable first so you don’t tear it out, like stuff like that. And you can imagine why I put that in there because it got torn out at some point. Right, right. But it’s all those little things. Right.

Dane (22:27):

And I was extremely lucky. Like I have the most incredible staff shout out to Jamie, Katie, Mackenzie, Mitch, Brennar, all incredible at what they do and the process of creating, some like SOPs, I’m not a gym person, you know, I don’t know how to train people. So I sent them to them and they looked at it and provided me some pretty fair feedback. Like Dane, that doesn’t make sense. Why would we do this? They’re the professionals. We changed it together. So then they had ownership over the experience we’re providing our clients. And so then of course they’re gonna implement it because they were part of it.

Mike (23:03):

So you’ve got buy-in there right away. You’ve got staff buy-in.

Dane (23:06):

Yeah. And I’m more than happy to outsource to that team because they’re so good at what they do. And then we could ensure that the changes we made made commercial sense for the gym, and it made practical sense for training. And then together, we were able to come up with pretty, pretty good process.

Mike (23:23):

That’s fascinating. Tell me about the plan going forward. You mentioned maybe a rate increase at some point or whatever, but what else have you got going on? Like what are the next big steps that you and Russell are working on and how did you guys decide that these were the big steps that would move the needle next?

Dane (23:37):

Yeah. Number one, getting our unit economics to make more sense.

Mike (23:42):

Explain unit economics.

Dane (23:44):

Our revenue needs to be higher. You know, we need to make more money. And we need to reduce costs that don’t make sense throughout stuff that that is not working for us and diversify our revenue streams through nutrition, PT squad classes and private squads. So ensuring that we’re just more viable going forward.

Mike (24:05):

So what’s the big next move? Is it gonna be like adding nutrition?

Dane (24:09):

Without giving away too much of my members who might listen to this –

Mike (24:12):

Yeah, yeah, no, you keep the secrets as you need to.

Dane (24:15):

We’ll probably have to do a member hike, a raise on our prices. I think they know that’s coming. They’ve been, paying very low membership for some time. So that’s gonna be the big one and making sure that we do that responsibly and in a way that’s not gonna offsite our members is definitely the next step.

Mike (24:30):

Yeah. And you know, I’ll tell you this. Like I went through that exact same process and we had had our rates in place for eight years, maybe nine years. And they were way too low. I knew that six years before I put the rate, increase in place. And that was literally a six figure mistake I should have put, I literally put the numbers in our software and said in 2013, I’m going to do this. I never did. And it cost us at least a hundred thousand dollars in lost revenue. Then when I did it, I was so scared, but I had the support of Two-Brain and I had the, you know, my peers in the growth group. And then I had the mento.r when we did it. Our members actually said like, like, thank you. It’s about time you did that. We were worried you guys were not gonna make it.

Dane (25:09):

Yeah, exactly. And, and I want our staff to have an incredible career with WVA. Yeah. And I want them to be well paid. I want them to have health insurance. I want them to love being part of what we’re building and the only way we can do that is to pay them market rate. And in New York it’s expensive and they do some really great work for us. So they deserve to be paid more and they deserve to be paid over the long term for it to be a sustainable thing. So I think that’s going to be the next step is ensuring that we can get people to salary employees and that kinda stuff.

Mike (25:42):

Step after that. Is that gonna be revenue diversification? If so, is it gonna be PT or nutrition first?

Dane (25:48):

I think for us, PT is really important. It’s a great way to fill in the gaps. You know, our real estate utility isn’t great. We load up between 6:00 AM and 9:00 AM. Then we have a big dark spot when evenryone runs off to work or goes crazy. So we can load that with PT. So get more out of our rent spend. Nutrition’s been an interesting one. We launched it. I think we can do a better job with it. And we need to tailor it, I think, to a New York appetite. certainly, but yeah, PT is definitely the next revenue stream. But then in terms of next big goals, I think if we can get a general manager in place and sorry, we have a general manager in place, but have a general manager operating another studio, that would be the next step.

Mike (26:37):

So that’s cool. And one of the things I’m excited is to hear where you go from here, because I know that gyms and I was one of ’em again, that mostly focused on group training. Yeah. When we started diversifying into personal training and nutrition, everything changed and like Jolene Bingham, who is one of our mentors who also runs gyms. She, at one point I forget the exact numbers, but she was almost exclusively group training over COVID. She changed her model, went really emphasized PT. And now that I believe is like 60 or 70% of her revenue or something, a very high number where she’s added a whole new stream that’s significant. So I’m really excited to see what you do once you start getting these other programs in place. And then the final part of that is that hybrid memberships are where sort of where that ARM number really gets kind of cool.

Mike (27:22):

Right. We talked to some of our gym owners, some listeners will be like, I could never charge $340 for a monthly service. Yeah. But I’ve talked to many gym owners now their ARM is well over 300. And it’s usually a combination of group training plus nutrition and or PT or PT plus nutrition. And those services are highly valuable because it’s one-on-one very personal service. It really does amazing things for the gym. So like, Dane, I can’t wait to talk to you again and find out where you’re at after you get this stuff in place. Cuz it could be again, the rocket ship’s going up.

Dane (27:54):

Yeah, definitely.

Mike (27:56):

Last thing I’ll ask you. People out here are, listening and I always like to talk to gym owners, I’m wearing a Two-Brain hat obviously. And so I’m, you know, gonna tell you the program’s great. But you, I’d like to have gym owners on here who explain it as real people. If a gym owner out there is thinking like, I don’t know if mentorship would work for me. What would be your advice to that person?

Dane (28:14):

Yeah, I mean, without just sounding like an absolute zealot, I would be all for it. I got so much value from it. particularly Russell, he was just great, very down to earth delivery of mentorship. You know, it wasn’t this, big brother kind of thing. And we just had a chat, you know, and we talked through how it might work. And then like most gym owners, I’m good at spending time with members and I love that part of it. And so creating a process and a system just allows me to do more of the stuff that I like and less time focused on kind of the boring stuff. And that’s because I was able to systemize it, create a process or offload it where possible, so absolutely worth the money. I think we made back, what we’re paying for it in the first session, just with the sales binder. So, yeah. All for, it.

Mike (29:07):

Yeah. And that’s why I was gonna ask you because people look at the price tag of mentorship and I know you’re a finance guy. So you were obviously looking for return on investment safe to say that you got what you were looking for.

Dane (29:15):

Definitely. Yeah. Without a doubt. Yeah. And I was ready for it to just be a sunk cost. Like I was ready for it to be a cost to me that I thought was gonna be worth it just by building my network in New York with someone who had done this before me. But like I said, the ROI was positive, within the first month.

Mike (29:33):

Wow. OK. That’s cool. So you were kind of just looking to hang out with Russell a little bit and it turns out you made some money.

Dane (29:38):

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I’m really blowing up Russell on this call. He is gonna think I wanna date him or something after this.

Mike (29:45):

Well, you know what, I’ll tell you this. On the other end, I was chatting with Russell, on Slack, just about this before this call. And he said, he had nothing but good things to say about you. So he has the same level of respect for you.

Dane (29:56):

So good to know.

Mike (29:57):

Thank you so much for your time, Dane. That was Dane McCarthy on Two-Brain Radio. I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. I’m all about telling the stories of amazing gym owners just like Dane. Please subscribe for more episodes. And if you’re on YouTube, hammer that like button totoo, I appreciate that. A great deal. Now here’s Two-Brain founder, Chris Cooper with a final word.

Chris (30:15):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. If you aren’t in the Gym Owners United group on Facebook, this is my personal invitation to join. It’s the only public Facebook group that I participate in. And I’m there all the time with tips, tactics, and free resources. I’d love to network with you and help you grow your business. Join Gym Owners United on Facebook.

 

The post How This Gym Owner Added 80 Clients in 30 Days appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

Client Stories: Jeff and Cynthia Fotti

Jeff and Cynthia Fotti, co-owners of CrossFit Rush, knew how to foster a strong gym community—but they didn’t know how to run a business.

“I only knew how to coach. The gym wasn’t doing well. It wasn’t profitable,” Jeff said. 

Between Jeff’s coaching all the time and Cynthia’s job as a dental hygienist, “we were completely overworked,” he added.

They decided to call Two-Brain Business, and their mentor, gym owner Jay Rhodes, had them focus on culling their overloaded calendar and refining their service offerings. He also urged them to dial in their onboarding system.

So when COVID hit, the Fottis were prepared. With systems in place, and with the owners’ mission top of mind, staff were able to step up to the challenge. They focused on listening carefully to clients’ needs and offering customizable hybrid options.

It’s paid off.

“We only have 74 members. We’re in a small community,” Jeff said in mid-2021. “But compared to this time last year, we increased our profit by just over $23,000. There were so many services that we got rid of, and we focused on our ARM. Our average rate per member this month is $316. So we don’t have to run all these services in order to be profitable.”

Cynthia Fotti

Cynthia added: “We had a mindset shift: There’s nothing wrong with being a profitable business. Once we worked that in—charging what we’re worth, make sure the value matches that—things just clicked into place.”

Now, Jeff is free to spend more time with his family. 

“I like having the freedom to do things when I want to do them,” he said, “and not be tied down.”

The couple’s progress in business has afforded Cynthia the opportunity to quit her hygienist job

“I’m really proud of my wife because she’s built a successful nutrition program and a kids program,” Jeff said. “She’s able to change from something that she no longer enjoys doing into something that she loves and she’s passionate about—that right there is my Perfect Day.”

In spring of 2022, we added Cynthia to our team of certified mentors as a specialist. To read more about her, click here.

The post Client Stories: Jeff and Cynthia Fotti appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

The 6 Critical Systems Every Gym Must Have

Mike (00:02):

Ever felt like your business is stagnant and you just can’t break through to the next level? The solution isn’t some sexy new marketing idea. It’s much simpler. You need great systems in every area of your business. Chris Cooper gives you an exact plan on this edition of Two-Brain Radio.

Chris (00:18):

Hey, everybody it’s Coop and today gonna share with you the six systems that you need to grow any gym business. Your business will not rise to the level of your marketing. It will fall to the level of your systems, meaning the level of excellence that you can deliver consistently depends on the systems. It doesn’t depend on how hard the owner works. It doesn’t depend on how excellent the owner is as a coach. It depends on how things go when the owner is not there, or when the owner is not having a bad day. There are six systems that you need. And keep in mind that we teach all of these systems in the Two-Brain mentorship program. We usually give you a template. Here’s exactly how to do it. And you can just follow that template if you want to, but because we’re not a franchise, you can also change the template and make it your own.

Chris (01:12):

Instead of giving you like a rigid business formula to follow what this actually does is it creates entrepreneurial freedom because you don’t have to make decisions about stuff that you don’t wanna make decisions about right now, you don’t have to have an MBA to run a super powerful business because all of these templates free you to make decisions really, really quickly, to have a lot of influence on the stuff that you do care about and just have decisions made for you based on data and what the best gyms in the world are doing. It gives you the ability to just copy them as much as you want to, but also to make it your own. So here are the six systems that you need to have a profitable business, a good gym that will sustain and let you change people’s lives with excellence. The first that you need is a self-payment system.

Chris (02:07):

You have to be able to pay yourself well, or your gym just can’t last. There are a lot of martyrs in our industry. Let’s face it. We all got into this to help people not to make money, but the two things are not mutually exclusive. You’re not a better gym owner because you can starve yourself longer than I can. So the first system that you need is a pay yourself strategy. My strategy was really, really simple. In the beginning, my family had no other income. We had to eat. So every Friday, just to buy the groceries and pay the heating bill, I had to earn $900. And so my system was really, really simple. I got a checkbook. I wrote myself a check for $900. I post dated it, you know, for weeks, weeks, weeks into the future, months at a time. And I took this lump of checks, this brick, and I deposited it way in advance so that I would not have a choice because I knew that given that choice every single Friday, when I was beat down and exhausted, I would make myself suffer.

Chris (03:11):

I would take a pay cut if I thought that the gym needed the money more than I did, it seems so ridiculous now. But at the time that was my mindset. So the first strategy is pay yourself more if or the first system that you need is how to pay yourself. And the strategy that we typically teach is pay yourself first. If you want another strategy that doesn’t come from Two-Brain, I really recommend profit first. It’s a little bit more complicated, but it will definitely get you there. And you can talk to my friend, John Briggs at Inctite Tax about profit first in your micro gym. The second system that you need in your micro gym is amarketing and sales system. You need to be able to increase the number of clients that you have or at minimum replace the clients that you’re losing.

Chris (03:56):

Every gym has some churn because people move away and other people, you know, they can just lose interest over time. While we do have a couple of really long term clients at catalyst like 13 years, even those people took very short breaks at some point in their client journey with us. And so you need a marketing system. What system of marketing should you use? Well, at summit this year, we’re gonna be teaching the four funnels, but really if you have one working marketing strategy, that’s probably all you need. So at catalyst, we use an affinity marketing, which is a referral strategy. OK? So that’s our system and that produces more than enough clients. We have a waiting list. We’ve had a waiting list for the last two years because of COVOD and we’ve decided to cap our membership at 150. Other gyms, want more clients. And so they might use affinity marketing, but they might use one of these other funnels too.

Chris (04:51):

So they might use organic online marketing. They might use paid ads from Facebook. They might use content marketing, or they might something else. It’s really up to you, but you have to have one marketing system, get it working really well. And then move on to a second marketing system. If you want to. where most gym owners mess up with their marketing is that they don’t have a system that they’re following. Instead. They’re just trying a bunch of random, one off things. I’m gonna remember to post a Facebook this week. I’m gonna remember to shoot a video that I can use on TikTok. I’m gonna start a podcast that runs for four episodes. You’re far better off to understand which marketing system you can deliver on to go really deep into that marketing system and tell it’s working, and then think about adding a second. Most people sample marketing, they don’t build a system.

Chris (05:50):

We teach many, many marketing systems in Two-Brain. We teach them one at a time. We get people working on them, just in our ramp up program alone we teach 10 different marketing strategies because we wanna see where people are strong instead of just like dabbling in one thing and saying, well, that didn’t work. And moving on to the next thing, we have 10 strategies that we know work, and we coach you to use them until they’re working for you. And then you try the next. And then at the end you decide which one or two or three you’re gonna stick with. OK? So a marketing system is really important. And I’m saying that not because you don’t have one, but because you probably have marketing ideas and not an actual system. The third system that you need is a system whereby you can earn more per client.

Chris (06:36):

Look every single CrossFit gym undercharges, OK. It’s not as true in other segments, but this is, you know, it’s definitely a challenge with CrossFit affiliates. A lot of other micro gyms also undercharge, many personal training studios under charge. I know every yoga school in existence, probably under charges. You have to have a system where you can increase the value that you deliver to each client and they can increase what they pay you in exchange for that value. There are a couple ways to do this. The way that we teach is a hybrid. So there are, you know, different ways to raise the ARM, the average revenue per member that can include the one-on-one training, nutrition coaching, or both, that can include a high ticket offering that can include specialty programs. And again, there are a number of ways that you can introduce these things.

Chris (07:31):

But the system that we teach is called the prescriptive model because we teach gym owners how to run client centric businesses. We are never teaching the gym owner to sell something that the client doesn’t need. In fact, what we’re doing is teaching the gym owner how to determine exactly what their clients need and then provide that service to them when they can. OK, so the system for raising the value of each client is called the prescriptive model. And of course there are many strategies that you can employ. No two gyms are exactly the same, even though Two-Brain has over 800 gyms now, but they’re all following the same system. And the prescriptive model, the high level view is this. You have a consultative process at intake. You have a way to measure results based on the client’s goals, you have a way to change the prescription over time for the client.

Chris (08:29):

And you also have a pathway for that client to refer their friends and bring new clients in. The fourth system that you have to have in your gym is a retention system. It’s not enough to just be an excellent coach and have a great community. OK? I just did a podcas, about the things that actually improve retention. So being a great coach, having a warm, welcoming environment, these things are essential, but they’re not enough. So you actually have to have a retention plan. So the system for retention that we teach in combination with that prescriptive model is mapping a client journey. If you think about building a client centric business, everything that you do at business, every system that you build, every price point that you create, every piece of equipment that you buy, every person that you hire should go to supporting the ideal pathway of a client through your business.

Chris (09:29):

And we call that the client journey. So the client journey in a lot of ways is really the backbone of your business. And until you write it down, break it down. It’s very hard to understand. So the system that you’re actually building here is a system of processes that follows the client. So for example, what happens during a no sweat intro? The first time a client comes through your doors? Well, you start by handing them a bottle of water. What happens next? You invite them to sit down. What happens after that? About eight minutes of straight up listening and asking why, what happens after that, et cetera. And you need to map that all out. Now you’re gonna get really down into the weeds at the NSI, but you need to think about what happens to the client the day after they pay and what happens to the client on all of the days before their first session, and what happens to the client after their sixth session, how do you address that?

Chris (10:27):

What happens to the client on their 90th day? What happens to the client the first time they encounter something like the intramural open, and you have to map all these things out. Now, we’ve gone a lot deeper with this than we have in the past. And we actually give Two-Brain clients now a sample model year to follow. So for example, we can say like, we want all Two-Brain gyms doing goal reviews in April. And so then our media team can jump in, create content, social media posts, emails to help Two-Brain gyms, get their clients to do goal reviews in April, and maybe it’s coach evaluation season in May. And the same thing can happen. But Two-Brain clients also know they need to book people for their goal reviews in April. So they need to keep time open on their calendar.

Chris (11:12):

They might need to bring in staff for a few extra hours. They might need to practice doing on goal reviews. They might need to train their staff on goal reviews. They might need to think about what their upgrade and downgrade options are. They need to be really fluent in the prescriptive model, et cetera. So when you’re keeping clients longer, the system that you need is mapping the client journey. Of course, you know, we go through this in great depth in our growth program, but if you want to find like a DIY version, I strongly recommend Joey Coleman’s book never lose a customer again. The fifth system that you need is a system where you are ascending yourself. So when you start off your business, you’re in the founder phase and you’re doing everything. You’re coaching the classes. You’re taking the personal training clients. You’re mopping the floors.

Chris (12:01):

You’re going to Walmart to get toilet paper. You are trying to learn marketing. You’re doing the consultations. You’re trying to do the goal reviews. I get it. But the system that you need is a system of Ascension for yourself. Because if you don’t have this system, you will always be doing those things. Your work will always fill your day, whether it’s high value or low value work, whether it’s building your business or just keeping you busy. So the system that we use here is called the value ladder. And so basically what you’re doing is breaking down, every hat that you’re wearing in the gym, you’re assigning a replacement value to each one. Then you’re starting with the cheapest role in which to replace yourself, hiring somebody for that role, spending more time in higher value roles, and then hiring the next person. As you climb the ladder, you are the people to fill the rungs that you’re vacating beneath you.

Chris (12:58):

So you’re moving up and you’re back filling behind you. OK? There are other strategies that you can use for this. I think a good starting point is probably the e-myth. If you pick up that book, you’ll understand what roles and tasks are. At least from there, it’s a little bit more to figure out. It took us a long time to work out this strategy and make it this simple, but we teach the value ladder. And that is the system for CEO Ascension in your business basically. And the sixth system that you need is to improve your ROI. So you basically need like an expense audit and your goal is not to see every year. Like, what can I cut from my expenses? Your goal is to improve the ROI on the expenses that you have. I mean, you’re not dumb. So when you sign up for something, you know, that there’s a potential that you’re going to get a great return on that investment, right?

Chris (13:51):

And I’m sure that when you signed your lease, you didn’t do it blindfold, right? You didn’t just pick a spot on the map and say, whatever’s there, I’m gonna rent it. You had a plan. You, you saw this location and you thought, OK, I need to get 300 people to make this thing work. Or I only need four people to pay the rent or whatever it was. When you signed up for mentorship, you thought, OK, here’s how I plan to take action on this and do the work. And here’s how I’m gonna lay the time out. But every year you need to audit those things, right? You need to audit the service that you’re getting from your bookkeeper. You need to audit the service that you’re getting from your marketing agency. You definitely need to audit the service that you’re getting from your website or your CRM or whatever other software that you use.

Chris (14:37):

And instead of saying, what can I cut? Because you can’t really cut any of this stuff. You need to say, how do I get a better ROI on this? So the system that we use is something that we call the five audits. And basically once a year, you have these, these worksheets and you start off by auditing your physical location and you walk around the gym and you say, OK, what needs to be fixed? How can I get a better ROI on the square footage that I have and the equipment that I have, and then you move on to the next audit. And that’s an operational audit. And you say, can I get more efficient with my operations? Not what can I cut, but how can this operate, this system serve me better and reward me more. And then you do like a sales audit and a marketing audit and a staff audit.

Chris (15:25):

And you say, how do I grow the pie for my staff? Creating bigger opportunities for my coaches while also growing my gym. So growing the pie, instead of slicing up the pie and giving them a bigger piece. So the six systems are, you need a self payment system. You need a system for marketing to increase the number of clients. You have. You need a system for sales to earn more for each client that you get, a system for retention to keep your clients longer, a system for ascension for you, so that you work on higher value roles and grow the business that way. And finally, a system for auditing your expenses and improving their ROI. You can measure each one of these with a different metric, different KPI. You measure your self-pay system by net owner benefit, how much the business is paying you.

Chris (16:19):

You measure the number of clients you have by doing a headcount. You measure how much you’re earning per client through a KPI that we call ARM, average revenue. Remember you measure your system for retention based on your leg, LEG length of engagement. You measure your system for Ascension based on effective, hourly rate EHR. What’s your time worth. And you measure your return on investment through a metric called ROI, right? Return on investment. And you wanna do that each of these things constantly. And to do that, to measure the efficacy of each one of these six systems, you have to track, you have to know what these numbers are. You have to know your ARM. You have to know exactly how many clients you have. You have to know how much the business is paying you, et cetera. That means you need a dashboard.

Chris (17:08):

And so in Two-Brain, we not only provide you with these systems, but also with the dashboard to progress. Now here’s the super secret bonus for those of you who have listened to 17 minutes of me talking about systems, when you really want to hear about the CrossFit open results. The secret is that if you improve one, you’ll improve them all. Because each of these six systems magnifies the rest. If improve your RM a little bit, that will improve your metrics on all of the other five. If you improve retention in every client that you have by one month that will improve your net owner benefit, it will improve the number of clients that you have onto your roof. It will improve how much you earn per client. It will improve how much time you can spend working on the business instead of in the business. And it will improve your return on investment, on your space and equipment. So I’m Chris Cooper. These are the six systems that you need in your business. In Two-Brain, we call these the simple six. We give you strategies and tactics for each one. You do not have to follow exactly what we give you. We give you a ton of options and you can customize or tailor anything for your gym because your gym is not my gym, but I want the same for youa s I’ve earned for myself,

Mike (18:26):

Two-Brain Radio airs twice a week with tips, tactics and stories from real gym owners who are building amazing businesses. Make sure you hit subscribe right now so you get it all. And now here’s Chris Cooper. One more time.

Chris (18:38):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. If you aren’t in the Gym Owners United group on Facebook, this is my personal invitation to join. It’s the only public Facebook group that I participate in. And I’m there all the time with tips, tactics, and free resources. I’d love to network with you and help you grow your business. Join Gym Owners United on Facebook.

 

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Two-Brain Leaderboard: Net Owner Benefit

How much does your business pay you to be the CEO?

When you open a business, you stop being a coach and start being an owner. You acquire different skills, you wear different hats, and you’re paid differently.

The success of your gym isn’t measured by how many members you have. It’s determined by what your gym pays you as CEO.

Making less than $100,000 per year?
Watch my webinar here: “How to Make $100,000 With 150 Members.”

And the kicker? You can make $100,000 with 50 members if you want to. But if you have 500 members and you’re not earning anything from your gym, you’ll close.

Some of us take salaries from gyms. Some take profit distributions. Some charge their gym rent as a landlord. To avoid overtaxation, some have their businesses pay their bills (like their cell phone or their car loan). Some do all of the above. Net owner benefit (NOB) is the total of salary, profit and the “extras” your gym provides for you.

For example, a gym owner might make $100,000 in NOB this way:

$66,000 salary ($5,500 per month)$20,000 profit ($5,000 quarterly distributions)$6,000 health insurance$6,000 vehicle$2,000 cell phone/extras

Total: $100,000 NOB (or $8,500 per month)

Here are the top gym owners worldwide for NOB in February 2022 (we publish the actual gym names for our clients but not publicly):

How did they do it?

They paid themselves first. Using strategies like Profit First, they wrote their paychecks before they did anything else. (Listen: “Why Your Gym Must Pay You First and How to Make It Happen.”)They increased gross revenue by increasing their client count, keeping clients longer and earning more per client.They maximized ROI on their expenses (instead of cutting expenses).They planned raises for themselves in advance.They maximized their value to the business by focusing on high-value roles.

That means they measured what the business paid them and figured out where their money was coming from, where their money was going and how they were spending their time. Then they relentlessly strove to improve each element. These are four of the “Six Strategies” we lay out in our free guide to making $100,000, which includes a self-assessment diagnostic.

Get the guide on our Free tools page. It’s called “How to Make $100,000 Per Year With 150 Clients.”

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New Tax on Some Canadian Gyms Is Beyond Stupid

After two years of suffering through extreme pandemic restrictions, gym owners in Saskatchewan, Canada, received more bad news last week:

In October, the government will add the six percent provincial sales tax to gyms. Also subject to more tax: football games, museums, rodeos, concerts, property and tobacco.

Why? According to City News, the expanded taxation is to “mainly address Saskatchewan’s backlog of surgeries and bed capacity worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So we’re going to add yet more taxes to gym goers, whose choice of activity is likely to make them healthier and reduce the strain on the health-care system?

Yep.

It gets better. Check out this line from the Regina Leader-Post: Finance Minister Donna Harpauer “did not explain why the budget suggested the tobacco tax should act as a deterrent for an unhealthy activity, yet the PST will now be applied to healthy physical activities.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking our governments really don’t care about the fitness industry.

Or common sense.

In June 2021, The New York Times reported on a BMJ study that concluded “people who start to exercise before or during middle age typically save anywhere from $824 to $1,874 annually on health care costs after retirement, and the earlier they start their workouts, the greater those savings can be.”

You can read the BMJ report here. Key line: “Our analyses suggest the healthcare cost burden in later life could be reduced through promotion efforts supporting physical activity participation throughout adulthood.”

Another stat: A 2012 study estimated that total health-care costs of physical inactivity in Canada to be $6.8 billion. In the U.S., “Costs associated with physical inactivity account for more than 11% of total health care expenditures and are estimated at $117 billion annually.”

I won’t bore you with all the other evidence that supports the fact that treating sick, sedentary people is expensive. Nor will I bury you with stats about how people who work out and eat well tend to be healthier.

I’ll just say that increased taxation of a post-pandemic fitness industry that’s already on life support is stupid and shortsighted. It’s the work of politicians who are disconnected from reality and incapable of producing effective solutions to problems.

Fit People Save Governments Money

The only way the move to tax gyms makes any sense is if you conclude that working out to improve your fitness has the exact same health effects as chugging beers at a football game or eating a corndog while watching a cowboy wrestle a steer.

I’ve long contended that gyms save the government money. For example, every single person who goes to a gym is less likely to be afflicted with obesity-related issues.

With that in mind, you could even make the argument that subsidizing gym memberships would be wise move for the government. If sedentary people started working out, they’d become healthier and stay out of hospitals. Governments might actually reduce health-care costs by a multiple of the subsidy amount. Even if they only broke even on it, quality of life would be improved for many people. That would be a wash and a win.

But common sense is truly dead these days.

Soon, Saskatchewan’s provincial government will lump working out in with chain smoking outside a concert venue.

It’s like taxing lettuce and broccoli to raise funds to combat obesity. It’s nonsensical. And it doesn’t even make economic sense at a basic level.

The reward for all these new taxes is estimated to be just $20 million annually. In government terms, that’s basically nothing.

Against a total health budget of well more than $6 billion annually, $20 million is far less than 1 percent.

So the government is going to making it more expensive to work out to collect just 0.003 percent of the revenue needed to fund health care? WTF?

If You Won’t Help, At Least Don’t Hinder

Why not just toss gyms out of this plan? I haven’t seen any stats yet, but it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which fitness centers contribute much to that $20 million.

Just leave them alone to try and get their clients and staff back after two years of COVID restrictions. Let them try to claw their way back to profitability and make a living while they improve health for their clients. Let them actually get people moving while bureaucrats produce generic fitness advice that won’t get anyone off the couch.

When things like this happen, it’s clear some politicians aren’t fit to govern. Change is needed.

But more than that, gym owners need to come together to push back. Make some noise, and have your clients do the same.

If one thing has been made clear over the last two years, it’s that governments care nothing for the fitness industry.

That needs to change. The health of nations depends on it.

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Tinker Phase: When You Don’t Have to Coach at 5 A.M.

“I have too much money and time,” said no gym owner ever.

If you’re in the early stages of gym ownership, or if you’re a long-term owner who’s stuck in a rut, you might think the line above is true.

But it’s not.

When a gym owner builds a solid business, it’s not uncommon for that entrepreneur to have a surplus of money and time.

So what to do with it?

Owning and running a gym is great. But it’s not as good as owning and running a sound fitness business that rewards you with income and freedom.

When you reach that point, your business is accomplishing its mission to help people, it’s creating careers for staff members, and you get to spend more time with your family—perhaps in Disneyland, if you like.

You, as owner, also get to look “up and out” instead of “down and in.” You no longer have to order toilet paper and coach the 5-a.m. class, so you can ask other questions:

How can I have a greater impact?

How can I improve my city?

How can I create a legacy for my family?

How and when can I retire?

And so on.

At Two-Brain, this is referred to as the Tinker Phase—it follows Founder Phaser and Farmer Phase. The very short summary:

As a founder, you work in your business.As a farmer you work on your business.As a Tinker, you work on yourself and new projects that interest and reward you.

Click here for a quiz to find out what phase you’re in.

If Tinker Phase sounds like a myth to you, I assure you it’s not. With mentorship, gym owners can reach it very quickly. It took Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper about a decade to get there because knowledge and data were scarce in 2012. But we’re now seeing owners reach this level in two or three years when they receive the right guidance and take action.

So what happens when you reach the next level? You get more guidance so you can keep ascending.

Tinkers: The Next Level

After you successfully build a gym, you’ll have more time and freedom and money. You can certainly choose to keep building that gym, but you’ll need to acquire new skills to take it further. Or maybe you want to diversify into real estate, get into crypto or start another business. You’ll need new skills for all of that, too.

So where do you get them? Two-Brain’s Tinker program.

This growing group of entrepreneurs is working on “what’s next,” and they’re turbocharging these new ventures by learning from their peers and business experts. They’re diversifying, expanding, growing, writing books, launching new projects and creating legacies—doing the kinds of things you can do when you know your general manager has the gym running like a top.

The group is full of inspiring people who support and motivate each other, and Two-Brain offers a host of resources to help these entrepreneurs succeed at the next level—when the stakes are higher and the rewards are greater.

Dream Big

If your gym is stable and you want to know what’s next, the Tinker program is for you.

And if your gym is on its way to becoming a cash-flow asset, the Tinker program can help you take the last steps. Surrounding yourself with people who’ve done what you want to do will help you sprint to the finish, then look up and out.

If you’re still in the early stages of gym ownership, you have some work to do. But put your nose to the stone after you take a look at the horizon to see what’s out there.

When I started a gym in 2011, I never thought “more” was possible. I thought coaching and cleaning were part of the game forever, and I never considered what else I could do if I built a gym that would run itself with just a little oversight from me.

Don’t make that mistake. Dream big. And then get the guidance that will help you get where you want to go.

To find out more about Two-Brain mentorship or the Tinker program, click here.

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Starting a Second Gym: Mike Turnquist’s Story

Mike Warkentin (00:02):

Buying gyms, buying out partners and buying more gyms. Mike Turnquist has done it all. And he’ll tell his tale on this edition of Two-Brain Radio. I’m Mike Warkentin, your host, please hit subscribe and like wherever you are watching or listening. Mike Turnquist is in the land of wineries and olive groves. Paso Robles on the central California coast which is beautiful. He’s had an interesting path to running two gyms and we’re gonna hash it out today. So, Mike, how are you doing?

Mike Turnquist (00:26):

I’m having a great day, Mike. Thanks so much for having me on.

Mike Warkentin (00:30):

I’m good. Where are you right now? It looks like you got some work going on.

Mike Turnquist (00:34):

I am in our newest gym, Atascadero CrossFit, which is just finishing up the construction, waiting on the Rogue truck. It should be on its way here really soon. Then we can load it up with beautiful, beautiful equipment and, get some fitness done.

Mike Warkentin (00:52):

Yeah. It’s gonna be Christmas in March for you when that truck rolls up. what does Atascadero mean?

Mike Turnquist (00:58):

Atascadero means, the translation is mud hole, which is, it’s really interesting. I grew up here, so I’m allowed to make fun of it. Yeah, little, little small town, about 30,000 people and, yeah, means mudhole.

Mike Warkentin (01:12):

It’s funny. Cuz I saw somewhere, the name popped up when I was doing some Googling and I remember someone saying, do they know what that means? And I was like, they do.

Mike Turnquist (01:21):

Yes we do.

Mike Warkentin (01:22):

All right. So let’s talk about this. I wanna talk about your current situation. How many gyms do you own and when did you begin ownership of each one? Bring me up to speed.

Mike Turnquist (01:30):

Yeah. Currently own two CrossFit affiliates and it’s always been a dream to own a gym. I’ve always just been fascinated by it and when I got into it, it was just like, OK, let’s spread this out. Let’s you know, leverage it and see, you know, grow this company and open up multiple locations. Cause what that can in theory do is triple, quadruple, you know, your revenue and the goal is not to grind for the rest of my life, but to own some businesses. So, way back, been in the real estate sales, residential sales for over 20 years. Got into that really, really young and found CrossFit in 2011 at a globo gym.

Mike Warkentin (02:23):

Old school. Nice.

Mike Turnquist (02:24):

Yeah. So, this was my 10th Open that we did and it’s come a long way. So just been, you know, seeing what fitness and health has done for me personally. You know, I used to be well north of 300 pounds.

Mike Warkentin (02:43):

Did you really?

Mike Turnquist (02:43):

Yeah, and was one of the people that just said, oh, it runs in my family, my whole family’s overweight and blah, this is just my destiny, but it’s absolutely not true. And I, you know, just fell in love with CrossFit and I’ve always been an entrepreneur, always been a business owner. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had a, you know, regular day job. It’s been decades. So, you know, when I started, I helped my friend open CrossFit Ergo. we went from the globo gym, they opened their own gym and then we moved over to CrossFit Inferno and then,

Mike Warkentin (03:24):

Bill Grundler’s place.

Mike Turnquist (03:27):

I love Bill. It was a really good start and my buddy decided to open his own gym and I’m like, Hey, I’ll help you out. You can’t barely turn on your computer on, let me, you know, let me help you out with membership software and marketing and little things there. And it was a real, you know, we just did it as a trade. I got a key to the gym and you know, pretty typical stuff.

Mike Warkentin (03:53):

Some protein supplements.

Mike Turnquist (03:55):

Yeah. He went along and you know, decided to go a different route. And the, you know, one of the coaches was like, Hey, we’re kind of afraid that we’re gonna come in Monday morning and the place is gonna be empty. Like no email, no nothing. And luckily that didn’t happen. But one of the coaches kind of twisted my arm and was like, Hey, you’ve been talking about this. You’d be great. Buy the gym, please. We love it here. So, after a 5:30 AM class, another member hit me up and said, Hey, I heard you’re looking to buy Ergo, CrossFit Ergo. And I said, yeah. And he’s like, you need a partner and I’m like, you got money. Let’s go. Right. So, his name was Steven. And to be honest with you, CrossFit Ergo would not exist without him.

Mike Turnquist (04:49):

It was a really good partnership. We had, as far as partnerships goes, he brought in a lot of capital. A lot of insight to business, he owns a couple of really high end businesses himself. And I ran the operations and it went like that really, really well. We didn’t step on each other’s toes. We just, you know, got Ergo to go where it was gonna go. But the plan was, he was a short term part of it. You know, he knew it was my passion and owning a gym wasn’t really in his long term vision, but he didn’t want it to go away either. So ended up buying him out, shoot, it’s coming up on a year that that happened. And I kind of understood that I’m gonna need some help. So a few months before that I secretly hired Two-Brain Business as a mentor and I paid for it outta my pocket, I didn’t run it through the gym. I didn’t want, you know, I didn’t wanna have to explain that big cost to him.

Mike Warkentin (05:56):

It’s fair, but I’ll still slap your hand for not putting it through the business.

Mike Turnquist (05:59):

Yeah. He wouldn’t have seen it as an investment like I did.

Mike Warkentin (06:05):

That’s fair cuz he’s getting out too. I get it.

Mike Turnquist (06:08):

You know, so, and it all happened all at the same time. I just, my mentor, Greg, another guy that if he wasn’t in my life, CrossFit Ergo wouldn’t exist.

Mike Warkentin (06:21):

This is Greg Strauch, right?

Mike Turnquist (06:24):

Yes. And the great thing about Greg is when I was, you know, watching the videos of who should you pick for your mentor, Greg happened to be the first one I watched. I’m like, that’s my guy. And I watched two other ones. And I just was like, Nope, that is my guy. You just know.

Mike Warkentin (06:43):

That’s great.

Mike Turnquist (06:43):

Yeah. You know, during rampup, it’s like, he saw me and he’s like, if I put too much plate on your plate, you’re gonna try to do everything and you’ll get nothing done. And he saved me from overwhelm and he just had me little baby steps along the way. And we ended up going from 9,000 in revenue, which was losing money at the time. And then late last year we hit 30,000. So in the course of one year we had tripled revenue. Now I wish it had stayed, you know, at that linear path, but you know, business.

Mike Warkentin (07:20):

COVID going on there too. And some other strange things in that period.

Mike Turnquist (07:24):

Yeah. So, you know, we ended up tripling revenue and it it’s just been fantastic. The members are loving it, everybody’s loving it. And I started paying myself, you know.

Mike Warkentin (07:37):

Congrats, that’s it.

Mike Turnquist (07:38):

You know, following the profit first model, which, you know, really works. It sounds weird at first. But when you start breaking it up in my bank, tried to talk me out of it. Like you don’t need all these. And I was like, Nope, I’m gonna do it. And, it just had a really good trajectory.

Mike Warkentin (07:57):

I’m gonna interrupt you Mike for one sec, listeners, if you wanna see the profit first model, we have John Briggs in our show archives profit first for micro gyms is designed to teach you what this is. The short version is you pay yourself first, before the gym eats up your expenses. Then you push yourself to create the money you need to get the gym to cover it’s sheet. All right, go ahead, Mike. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanna make sure people know what they’re getting into there.

Mike Turnquist (08:18):

Yeah. Owning a gym is a passion project for most people, but you’re not gonna do it for free forever. You won’t, you will catch up and it’ll hit you like a ton of bricks. So getting paid every single month is really cool.

Mike Warkentin (08:35):

Especially when you create it yourself.

Mike Turnquist (08:38):

Yeah. So know to back up, when I first started with Greg, I said, Hey, Greg, you know, I don’t know if it was Jason Khalipa or whatever, just like owning all these other gyms. I was like, I wanna expand. I want to, you know, get things going and then move on. And so owning multiple gyms was always part of the plan. So now the story of Atascadero CrossFit, Atascadero CrossFit was opened up by another Inferno coach, Dustin and Curtis. They opened this up in 2012, I believe, again, as a passion project. And, Dustin’s an L1 seminar staff. Dustin Virgil.

Mike Warkentin (09:20):

I haven’t met him but I know the name.

Mike Turnquist (09:22):

Just a good dude, you know, just a super good dude. And he ended up selling it to another guy. We’re all former Inferno guys, you know? And, so he ended up taking it over, letting the CrossFit affiliate expire and merged it in with his other gym in San Luis Obispo. It’s called Headstrong. So it became Headstrong instead of Atascadero CrossFit. But the cool part is none of the, the building never changed. The signage never changed and I kept hitting him up, you know, every couple of months, Hey, you know, I would love to take over that. I don’t know if it’s a problem or whatever. I, you know, things are going really good. And he kept saying, Nope, got big plans, got big plans. And three months go by I hit shoot him another text. He said, Nope, I’m gonna keep plans. I said, great. And, come December, his big plans came to fruition and he bought a big giant globo gym next to a big grocery store in a retail store.

Mike Warkentin (10:25):

This is Dustin?

Mike Turnquist (10:27):

No, this is the other guy guy. And in the meantime Dustin’s been a member at our first gym. So like he was moving out of the space and me and Dustin had just been talking like, dude, it’d be really cool to, you know, reopen ACF. And, so when he moved out, I nabbed up the building and I said, Dustin, I got the building, with your blessing, can I rebuild ACF? And he said, yep. So he’s super excited about it. The community is super excited to bring it back. And, yeah, so that’s how we came up with the tagline ACF Reborn. And we ended up naming the LLC ACF Reborn. It’s kind of just a really cool story. And when the word got out Dustin’s phone was blown up, Hey, I heard ACF’s coming back. So it’s really, really kind of fun to take that legacy and that reputation that he built and honor it and make sure that I don’t tarnish it. Like my friendship with him really means a lot to me. And, the last thing I want to do is disappoint Dustin. I mean, it sounds cheesy, but it’s a really cool story, and it makes it worth it, you know?

Mike Warkentin (11:53):

So this gym that you’re in right now, so this was the building, this was the same building that it’s always been in?

Mike Turnquist (11:59):

Yep.

Mike Warkentin (12:00):

But when, so you only had to acquire the building, not buy the gym, right. Cuz Atascadero CrossFit was gone.

Mike Turnquist (12:06):

Correct. So yeah, it was basically a blank slate. They took the floor, they took the equipment, you know, all that was left was that mural that’s sitting behind me, you know? I repainted it.

Mike Warkentin (12:19):

Let’s see it.

Mike Warkentin (12:21):

Woo. That;s nice.

Mike Turnquist (12:22):

Yeah. So what’s really cool is it’s just, it was a blank slate and re affiliated. And once I got the blessing from CrossFit, you know, we relaunched.

Mike Warkentin (12:35):

OK, so now I gotta figure this out. So you’ve got Ergo is, you’ve got that going nicely, you know, you 3X revenue and you said, you know, it’s not one of those linear things where it’s like now at 90 grand a month. But like we talked about this, entrepreneurship is always that series of like a little bit forward, couple steps back and then a big jump forward and so forth. So we’re working in good shape it there, you got it to a place where you were comfortable, then you go and you’re going to start location two. How far away is it?

Mike Turnquist (13:02):

About 15 minutes.

Mike Warkentin (13:04):

So not too far.

Mike Turnquist (13:05):

Right on the cusp of where people will drive to you, you know?

Mike Warkentin (13:09):

Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. So now how does this work or how are you gonna split your time? How are you going to like manage both are you gonna share staff members? Like what’s the plan to get this second one to the space where Ergo is?

Mike Turnquist (13:20):

Yeah, so what’s really exciting is Greg has helped me build up my coaching staff at Ergo. It was just me and two original coaches. And, so just followed the steps and I no longer coach, you know, an emergency I’ll step in and whatever, I’m just handling the operations and the marketing and the sales. So I do all the no sweats and, you know, handle the staff. So purely management role. And so our staff is super excited about the new gym, because we all know it. We all know, we see Dustin every morning, you know, it’s like, so they’re really excited to split time, get more hours, more coaching. Maybe they’re super excited about new equipment. I don’t know. but everybody’s on the same wavelength. And they’re really excited to coach here and coach there. I’ll probably coach a little bit too, just to kind of get it rocking and rolling. You know, but, eventually it’s just gonna be, Hey, I just wanna do, you know, do the no sweats for both gyms and then I’ll, you know, bring on, a general manager that does the sales and step out and then location number three, wherever that may be.

Mike Warkentin (14:37):

OK. So, sorry to interrupt you. I’m gonna ask you about sales, knowing that you were in real estate. So we’ll get back to that in a little bit, but, what I really wanted to ask you about in that situation, you’re sharing some staff right away, are memberships gonna share as well?

Mike Turnquist (14:52):

No, it’s specifically gonna be two separate companies. So that, you know, if I ever, Hey, I’m not interested in this one, I can sell it off as an asset. So they’re not tied together.

Mike Warkentin (15:05):

Yeah. Clever. I like it. Now with that model, have you, so are you gonna start with zero members or what’s your plan for the grand opening and when’s the date of this one?

Mike Turnquist (15:14):

I have one member so far, we’re doing our founders club and

Mike Warkentin (15:20):

That was my next question. You beat me to it. Nice.

Mike Turnquist (15:22):

So, I started marketing probably three or four days ago and the leads are just kind of rolling in and, you know, calling ’em all and I’ve got no sweats set up through the week, so it’s gonna happen. The Rogue truck should show up. it should leave Ohio on the 23rd. And that puts us, you know, first week of April, if we rush and put it all together, which, you know, should only take a couple of days to get through all the cardboard. So we’re looking first week of April.

Mike Warkentin (15:51):

So we’re in good shape. So do founders club is a plug and play plan that Two-Brain has for gyms to start like open on day one with members. And I think the record is like 94 or something like that, that might even have been beaten, but it was at one point 94. So gym opened on day one with 94 paying members, which is incredible because I think when I opened think I had 6,000 square feet and I think I had eight.

Mike Turnquist (16:14):

Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (16:15):

And, it was rough.

Mike Turnquist (16:16):

It’s stressful, Ergo’s kind of funding a lot of it. But another like epiphany moment is Chris’s book “Start a Gym” came out the day that I was meeting with the landlord.

Mike Warkentin (16:32):

Oh, hallelujah, let it rain yeah.

Mike Turnquist (16:34):

Showed up and I’m like, OK, I don’t need anything else.

Mike Warkentin (16:38):

And listeners, if you wanna take a peek at, I’ll give you a tip, there are free resources go to startagym.com. You will find some free founders club resources you can download right now without even buying the book. And if you wanna buy the book, I recommend you do it. You can do it on that site too, it’s startatgym.com, the founders club is a huge, huge deal because your first goal, when you open a gym is to get to breakeven. Second goal is profit, but break even first. And if you get members ahead of time, your stress will go way down. So tell me, Mike, have you got the whole founders club plan, just lined up and ready to roll now.?

Mike Turnquist (17:12):

Yeah, I’m just following it to the T, Greg has taught me don’t question it don’t overthink it. Just execute. Yep. And, so yeah, we have the founders club all ready to go. We you know, set up the landing pages through GLM. And, yeah, the marketing is fairly the same as, as the Two-Brain Marketing course, you know, just it’s plug and play.

Mike Warkentin (17:36):

So this is cool. Are you doing anything like in the founders club, there are a couple of variations where you could like, you know, include like t-shirts and things like that. Is there anything special that you’re doing? That’s very like Atascadero for the founders club.

Mike Turnquist (17:47):

We have a really orange t-shirt. Cause as you can see, Atascadero’s colors are orange and gray and, yeah, we just offering supplements and kickstart sessions. And then if you, one thing I kind of changed was if you prepay for three months ahead of time, you get our nutrition challenge. You know, so it was just kind of like, how can we triple the income here and, you know,

Mike Warkentin (18:14):

Yeah. Get money in the bank earlier. I, yeah, I get it. And what you’re doing there is you’re creating a valuable package. Chris has always been adamant that you don’t discount your rates, because if you offer discounts in the beginning, you have to find that many more clients. But if you package some things together, you know, like free nutrition seminar, things like that, all of a sudden you can create like $500 of value to a client who can sign up on the spot, gets you some cash and get some members. And then the best part about this is that your founders club members become your best marketing tool, because then you use the Two-Brain affinity marketing guide, talk to them, get their friends and family and go from there. So I’m sure Greg’s talked to you about that too.

Mike Turnquist (18:49):

Yep. He sure has.

Mike Warkentin (18:51):

Yeah. Greg is checking all the boxes. I love it. I love it. So what are the main challenges to Atascadero right now? Is it just waiting for the trucks to come in and doing the renos? Or is there anything else that like in the startup phase is tough?

Mike Turnquist (19:04):

Yeah, it’s I’ve been doing most of the work myself and just with a couple of volunteers, I subbed out some electrical and some drywall work. But we built a, no sweat intro room, that wasn’t here and good place to do InBodys and things like that. But yeah, it’s just the waiting game, you know, I would’ve pushed the construction faster. It’s kind of nice to be a little lax on the timing, but like, I want that equipment. I wanna open, I wanna start training, you know?

Mike Warkentin (19:36):

Yeah, yeah. You just go and a couple rocks and put em in there and start teaching to deadlift. It’s been done. What have you learned at the other place doing no sweat interest and consultations. And how does that sync up with your experience selling, you know, what I’m guessing are probably a million dollar properties?

Mike Turnquist (19:59):

It’s a different product. So instead of selling, you know, 500, a million dollar product, you’re selling, you know, $200 thousand dollar stuff, but the core concept is exactly the same. It’s listening, finding out what makes them tick, what they want and then providing the solution to them. And the fundamentals of sales when you do it this way, when you, I say, when you do it right, are exactly the same. So it, wasn’t hard for me to be like, oh, cool. I gotta sell gym memberships. Here, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more. And you keep digging deep. and then it’s really not a salesy. It’s not, you don’t really have to close. It’s like, you already know. And believe you have the answer to their problem. You just don’t know what their problem is, or maybe they don’t know what their problem is yet.

Mike Warkentin (20:56):

That’s the motivational interviewing, you know, why, why, why is that important.

Mike Turnquist (20:59):

Right. Yeah. And it’s just been, just a couple of shifts, couple of tweaks, you know, managing, you know, the expectations and it hasn’t been a very hard transition.

Mike Warkentin (21:13):

When you sold back in the day before you were doing the Two-Brain stuff, did you use a consultive process like that or did you just do what we all did back in the day in CrossFit just like, Hey, come do Fran, throw up and maybe sign up?

Mike Turnquist (21:25):

We did a couple, yeah. A little bit, but that included like this horrible assault bike workout, and then before that, it was just like, Hey, come try a free week.

Mike Warkentin (21:39):

Sure.

Mike Turnquist (21:39):

And, you know, we all know they come and maybe they do one or two, but then you never see ’em again,

Mike Warkentin (21:44):

Go do yoga for a free week. And then they’re. Yeah.

Mike Turnquist (21:46):

Yeah. Our onboarding has completely changed and it continues to change and get better and better and better. And as far as I know, we’re the only gym that actually has onboarding.

Mike Warkentin (22:01):

It’s a market separater, big time.

Mike Turnquist (22:04):

Yeah. I don’t,

Mike Warkentin (22:05):

I mean, actually, sorry, we know like with data at Two-Brain that the better job you do at onboarding in the first 90 days, the longer that client will stay with you. Right. You might get the occasional person will still drop off. That happens. But the more effort you put in the first 90 days, the longer your length of engagement, which is one of those huge metrics, LEG, as we call it, combine that with ARM, average revenue per member and that’s revenue. Right. So that’s what we’re looking at. How fast do you think that you can get this gym spun up to where you want it? That’s a huge question. Cause the idea, Chris and I have talked about this all the time. Once you have entrepreneurial experience, and especially as a gym owner, you should be able to replicate that success at another location faster than the first time. But some people don’t have that because they get overwhelmed and get pulled into directions and so forth. So how do you avoid that? And how fast can you get this spun up?

Mike Turnquist (22:56):

I think you avoid that with your systems and you know, your SOPs. And that is one thing that I wish I had spent more time in the beginning is finalize my SOPs and cuz they’re still not done all the way, but we have, you have to systemize and then once it’s systemized, you can leverage it. You can teach it to a staff and then there’s that, you know, that whole transition period of like, they can’t do it as good as me. Until you realize these people are better than you at a lot of things. Yeah. So like my coaches, they’re way better coaches. I have no business coaching.

Mike Warkentin (23:40):

It’s a good feeling, right?

Mike Turnquist (23:41):

The girl who does our social media, our joy girl, she is way better at social media and all sort of stuff. She’s our party planner. You don’t want me planning the parties. You know, she basically ran our whole intramural open and everybody’s like, this was so great. I’m like, that’s Marley. I had, you know, I just write her checks, she did it all, give her all the praise and yeah, just finding the right staff and systemizing it. And then you can feel comfortable spending time elsewhere. And they’ve made a couple comments like, you’re not here anymore. I’m like, I know I’m doing floors. You know, but, it’s allowed me to come here and spend time in the new gym, launching that, you know.

Mike Warkentin (24:23):

That’s gonna be music to Chris Cooper’s years. Cause he’s the systems guy. He loves that stuff. And I just actually spoke to another gym owner this morning, Dean McCarthy in New York. He’s another Two-Brain guy. he was saying that getting systems in place was one of the most important things that he did at his gym. So I’ll ask you this, is Greg gonna grind you to get that playbook done and get everything finished.

Mike Turnquist (24:40):

It comes back. Yeah. Like, Hey, finish this SOP and it’s not the systems that’s the hard part. It’s the documenting the systems.

Mike Warkentin (24:51):

Oh, I know. Right. Cause it, you could just do it in the time that you would take to write it down. It’s a pain, but yeah.

Mike Turnquist (24:56):

Yeah. But spending the three or four times longer the first couple of times to do it, to document it is well worth it. Well worth it. Cuz then you can just take that.

Mike Warkentin (25:05):

I think that’s what a lot of people missed. Yeah. And I think that’s what people missed back in the day is like a lot of gym owners in the early days were racing to get that second location. They would just open it without a single system or a playbook or anything like that. No policies, no procedures. You know, we were taking money with the envelope on the wall and stuff like that. Right. That doesn’t replicate. But then you look at a business like McDonald’s, they’ve replicated that with a rubber stamp all around the world because they have those systems and procedures and whether or not they’re serving healthy food, doesn’t matter. They know how to create a system like nobody’s business. And that was my first job out of high school. Right. So future’s looking bright at a Atascadero. Ergo. How much time are you gonna plan to spend there now? So is it gonna be just like check in once in a while, you gotta manager there?

Mike Turnquist (25:45):

I think probably, maybe like a 40, 60 split. I, you know, that’s my baby, that’s, you know, it’s three minutes from my house. So, yeah. That’s where I have my real estate office, you know, it’s in the back of the gym, so yeah.

Mike Warkentin (26:02):

Still do some selling?

Mike Turnquist (26:02):

Yes sir.

Mike Warkentin (26:02):

I didn’t know that. Nice. Right on. Yeah. OK. So let me ask you this. Now, someone who’s thinking about doing that second location, what would you advise them? What can you tell them that like, the thing that you’re sure about that would help them out?

Mike Turnquist (26:19):

Make sure you have a lot more reserves than you think you need. Cuz you can never estimate every little thing, that you,

Mike Warkentin (26:31):

Are we talking cash or energy?

Mike Turnquist (26:33):

Cash and energy. Yeah. Actually both because it’s gonna be harder than you think it will be. And you have to have a support system because I tell you what, there’s many a days that I’ve left this place, I’ve made a horrible mistake. This is gonna, you have these highs and lows and then the rent comes due and you’re like, OK, this was a mistake. I still have zero members, you know? So you’re gonna go through these waves. So I’d say have a support system and have extra cash and make sure your SOPs are done. Make sure, you know, your first gym can run without you, make sure that it can survive a vacation, like go on vacation, test it, you know? Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (27:21):

Chris has talked about that. That’s a big one. I think a lot of people, they try to open that second gym with the other one, just, you know, kind of teetering on that plate. And then they step away and the plate falls as opposed to getting it like a surplus, we’ll call it, like you said, a surplus of like, you know, profitability and stability at that other gym where you know, this top is gonna keep spinning while you get the other one moving. Let me add you this. If you go for gym three, would you start a new one or would you look at buying an existing one?

Mike Turnquist (27:49):

You know, I’d consider both, I think there’s pros and cons to each one. I think when you buy an existing gym, like we did the first time you have revenue coming in, like you got some problems, you know, maybe you gotta deal with, with junky equipment or just things that aren’t the way you want it. But when you start fresh, you can do it the right way from the start, with no revenue. So it kind of goes both ways. Is it easier to fix bad habits or fix, you know, we had a lot of a big turnover when things started to change because the members aren’t used, they’re like, no, it’s been this way forever. Yeah. Like we don’t want coaching. We don’t want this. Now you’re giving us level? Like, no. Yeah. So there’s a kickback when you start to change things. But then again, having zero members from the start with a bunch of bills, is it just depends which one, which one feels better at the time. I guess. There’s pros and cons. Yeah.

Mike Warkentin (28:55):

So you’re not on either side. You like a good business person would evaluate both ’em at the time. Cause I know there are some people that are adamant about, I would only start another gym and other people are like, I would only buy another gym. I talked to a guy in Utah who’s bought six of them and he buys existing ones. And they have to be, I believe he said they have to, he likes unprofitable ones because he turns ’em around fast, which is fascinating and scary for me. But that’s how he rolls. Chris Cooper on the other hand prefer, if he was gonna do a second gym, he would prefer to start from scratch or buy an audience of a gym and probably get rid of just about, you know, a lot of the policies and procedures and so forth. So he’d be looking to buy that audience, which is like the people that are listening to that gym speak. So it’s interesting. I’m gonna be curious when you get to gym three, what you’ll end up doing.

Mike Turnquist (29:39):

Yeah. Maybe you’ll have me back on.

Mike Warkentin (29:41):

I would love to. I wanna thank you so much for being here today. Mike, I’m gonna let you get back to laying your flooring there and wish you all the best of luck in this. Thank you so much.

Mike Warkentin (29:49):

Thank you.

Mike Warkentin (29:50):

That was Mike Turnquist on Two-Brain Radio. I’m your host Mike Warkentin. For more shows like this and advice from Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper, please subscribe for more episodes. And if you’re on YouTube, please hammer that like button too right now, do it with my thanks. Now here’s Chris Cooper with a final word.

Chris Cooper (30:06):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. If you aren’t in the Gym Owners United group on Facebook, this is my personal invitation to join. It’s the only public Facebook group that I participate in. And I’m there all the time with tips, tactics, and free resources. I’d love to network with you and help you grow your business. Join Gym Owners United on Facebook.

 

The post Starting a Second Gym: Mike Turnquist’s Story appeared first on Two-Brain Business.

How Much Is Enough? (Why We Talk About Millionaires)

Mike (00:02):

My mission as a gym owner is to help people through fitness, not be rich. So why does Two-Brain Radio have shows about making money and why does Chris Cooper make YouTube videos about gym owners who are millionaires? Yo Coop? What’s the deal?

Chris (00:16):

Gym owner, I know you. I’ve been a gym owner myself since 2005. I’ve been a personal trainer since 1996. And like you, I didn’t get in this for the money. I found fitness in high school. I was a skinny nerd and didn’t have a ton of friends. I had a few friends though. I had given up sports for good in the ninth grade when I couldn’t make the hockey teams anymore. Just being too small, frankly, too slow and too weak. And in the 13th grade, which we had back then in Canada, a friend of mine pulled me into the weight room and we just started doing, you know, lifting on the old universal and stuff. But something happened really quick before I gained a pound before I gained any strength at all, I started gaining confidence and I found that I was able to make eye contact with adults and I could have a conversation with my peers.

Chris (01:07):

And sometimes I could even talk to girls and that had a profound impact on me. Now I had already decided what I was going to do as a career. I loved the show CSI. And so I figured I was going to be some kind of pathologist or forensic technician. And so I had already chosen my school based on that. And when I got to school, a couple of my friends were in the chiropractic program and they were always going to classes to learn about anatomy and physiology. And I said, I can’t believe this is a career for you guys. And they said, yeah, you know, here’s what to do. And so I actually changed my major as soon as I figured this out to athletic therapy, they called it back then. And I started getting minors in things like gerontology, but also in business.

Chris (01:50):

And so eventually I knew that I wanted to have a career helping people find the confidence that I had found through fitness. Now everybody starts in a different spot, but I wanted to get them to this spot that I had found. And I kept lifting weights through college. And eventually I became a mountain biker because of a job that I had. And then I turned into a powerlifter because I was tired of being skinny, but fit. And then I spent years doing that. And then I turned to CrossFit and I did CrossFit for a decade. And now I’m back as a cyclist and weightlifter. And the thing is I really still want to give this gift of fitness. And I feel so fulfilled in my ability to do that. That’s why I still own a gym because I wanna share this with everybody else.

Chris (02:35):

And I know you do too. So why are we talking about the money? Why are we doing podcasts and YouTube videos about how to make a million dollars, you don’t care about that? Do you? All you wanna do is make enough to keep your gym going so that you can keep changing lives through CrossFit or through yoga or through whatever your fitness practice is, bungee, dance, Pilates. It doesn’t matter. You just wanna be able to keep doing that for the rest of your life. And I get it because I know you. Here’s the thing. To keep doing this for the rest of your life, to change the lives of a thousand others, instead of just a hundred others or 10 others, you have to make enough money and a little bit more. So first let’s talk about how much money is enough to keep you paid and keep you living the life that you wanna live.

Chris (03:40):

You should be able to make from your gym enough money to cover all of your household bills and reach a certain level of prosperity. We refer back to the happiness index for this a lot. And so the happiness index says that in most places in north America, earning $70,000 a year will lift you up to the level where money can make you happier. But then it tapers off. You know, below $70,000 more money will solve the problems that are making you unhappy. Above $70,000, more money won’t really make you any happier because it won’t significantly change your lifestyle. So we start there. Now, the reality is the happiness index is kind of for one person, but a family can do well with a hundred thousand dollars a year income. And when we do our state of the industry survey, the predominant number that most people give us is I wanna make a hundred thousand dollars a year.

Chris (04:38):

If I was making a hundred thousand dollars a year, that would be enough to pay all of my bills, support my family, and make a living from this gym. Now, as a gym owner, you should be able to do that. You know, the average salaries for a personal trainer are between 27 and $42,000 a year. That’s probably not enough, but as a gym owner, you should be able to leverage your skill, expertise, team and brand and make a hundred thousand thousand per year. But I want you to make a little bit more than that. I actually want you to make at least $105,000 per year. Now our programs are set up in different segments, different targets. Our ramp up and growth program are set up to get you to a hundred thousand. Our tinker program is set up to get you to a million in net worth and beyond. But I actually want you to make a bit more than you need.

Chris (05:31):

So whether that number is $70,000 a year for your family, or it’s a hundred thousand dollars a year, I want you to make a bit more and here is why. You will not be able to do this until you die. Don’t get me wrong. You will be passionate about fitness until you die. I know you, you will never stop working. You’ll never just hang it up. You’ll never retire in the conventional sense that our parents retired and spent the morning watching the price is right on TV and spent the afternoon talking to their golf buddies or whatever. That’s not for you. You’re not going to do that. You will never lose your passion for coaching. You will always be doing something to help other people get healthy and fit. I know it because I am you. However, someday you will not work a 60 hour week. Someday.

Chris (06:25):

You will not get up at 4:00 AM to coach a personal training client or open your gym and work until nine at night. At which point you will want to mop. Someday, your kids’ baseball game is really gonna seem important at 5:00 PM. More important than coaching that class of postmenopausal women, who you love, but do not compare to your kids’ baseball game. Someday your spouse is going to look at you and say, you’re a stranger to me. Unless you take the time to reinforce your relationship because your business will become all-consuming if you let it. Someday, you’re going to want to stop. Maybe for an hour mid-afternoon, maybe for a weekend, maybe for a month, maybe forever. And that is why you need to make a little bit more money than you actually need. What do you do with that money? I’m actually writing a book about that right now called Millionaire Gym Owner.

Chris (07:25):

And in the book, I talk about something called the cascade effect. So most gym owners leave way too much money in their business, right? You have this like piggy bank of funds, maybe five or 10 or 20, or sometimes $60,000 that are just sitting there because you’re scared. You’re scared something catastrophic is gonna happen. That all your clients will leave at once, that competitor will open up down the street and they will just kill your business. You’re saving this 60,000 as a parachute. It’s a just in case. Instead, you should take $5,000 a year off the top from your business, use profit first, pay yourself first, whatever it takes to get that $5,000 out and invest that somewhere else. And when you do that, you’ve taken the first step in creating a cascade toward wealth. Your cup overflows a tiny little bit.

Chris (08:19):

That overflow goes into a new cup and you keep filling that cup until it overflows. And then that overflow goes into another cup. A great example, you’ve got $5,000 in your business. You take that 5,000 out and you put it in something that gives you like a 5% return, OK? Index funds, whatever. Something that’s a long term play that you’re not gonna mess with every day, because you do not have the time, attention or energy to become a professional day trader. If your investment is distracting, like Bitcoin would be for me, put it somewhere else where you don’t need to pay attention, right? Put it in a boring place with a predictable return and let that begin to compound because here is the secret. The money that you leave in your business does not compound. The money that you pay yourself does not compound. The money that you invest compounds.

Chris (09:12):

And the miracle of math is really compounding interest. Money that you use to buy new rowers that you quote unquote reinvest in your business that does not compound. Money that you use to, you know, buy new space that you reinvest by hiring a GM. That money does not compound. You need to be able to and have the discipline to take money out of your business, but first the money has to be there. And that’s why we say we want you to make as much as you need and a little bit more. That little bit more is for your future. That little bit more is the key that unlocks financial freedom for you. That little bit more is not greed. It is opportunity. Hope that helps when you’re thinking about how much to pay yourself and why you want to listen to podcasts about how to make a million dollars. Someday you’re gonna need it.

Mike (10:10):

Ah, now I get it. Thanks, Coop. Want more content like this? Two-Brain Radio airs twice a week with tips, tactics and stories from real gym owners who are building amazing businesses. Make sure you subscribe so you get it all. And now here’s Chris one more time.

Chris (10:24):

Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. If you aren’t in the Gym Owners United group on Facebook, this is my personal invitation to join. It’s the only public Facebook group that I participate in. And I’m there all the time with tips, tactics, and free resources. I’d love to network with you and help you grow your business. Join Gym Owners United on Facebook.

 

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Are You Losing Clients With Unanswered DMs?

Ever booked a free consultation or sold a gym membership on Instagram, Facebook or YouTube?

If you have, congratulations: You’re on the tip of the marketing spear in the post-pandemic period.

If you haven’t, you might be giving prospective clients the shaft.

Communication patterns are changing, and it’s important for gym owners to know their audiences and make it easy for its members to make contact.

Three questions:

When was the last time you had a phone conversation?When trying to contact a person or business fast, how would you do it?If you see both email and social notifications on your phone, which app do you open first?

Now answer those three questions as your ideal client. Are the responses different?

One more question for you, the owner:

How long does it take your business to respond to inquiries and messages through your gym’s social-media channels?

My guess is that it takes a while. My reasoning is that when I review social accounts for gyms, I regularly see gaps of several days or weeks between posts. Or I see some pattern that indicates the account isn’t exactly at the top of the to-do list.

That was fine a decade ago. Now it’s increasingly risky.

“But I hate posting on social media.”

I get it. But here’s today’s lesson: Social media is no longer just about you and outbound messages to your audience.

It’s About Them Now

Consumers always kinda hated outbound messaging focused on brands. Don’t believe me?

Just imagine watching “The Mandalorian,” “Yellowstone” or “Vikings: Valhalla” with commercials. It’s like thinking about a chocolate cookie covered in dog hair and mustard.

Modern consumers don’t want their eyes taped open while they’re forced to watch ads. They want dialogue and interaction—and they want things on their timelines.

“Unlike traditional one-way advertising communications, social media is a two-way communications platform. Retailers and brands fall short when they fail to understand the personal engagement side of social media.”

That comes from Forbes, and you should read this article in its entirety.

Here’s another chunk of the Forbes piece, and it’s weighty:

“When people reach out to a brand on social for help or more information, they expect an answer within a 24-hour window, (Sprout Social chief marketing officer Jamie) Gilpin notes. That means the social media department can’t just be staffed with a small team, or in the case of an independent retailer, one social media manager responsible simply for posting messages. It requires retailers to adequately staff the customer-service and support function within the social media department.”

Here’s more, from IHRSA’s Club Business International publication: A 2021 Outbrain survey of 8,000 people found that 63 percent of U.S. consumers rate the accessibility of a brand as the No. 1 consideration when purchasing.

Marketing expert Anderson Fernandez, who wrote the article for the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association, actually advises gym owners to delete social accounts they don’t monitor carefully to “avoid the possibility of a potential member trying to contact you there and being left with a bad impression when they never hear back.”

Let me restate that:

A marketing expert is suggesting it might be better to delete a social account entirely if you don’t plan to respond to messages on the platform quickly.

Compare that advice to the mentality of a gym owner—perhaps you—who views social media as an annoyance and almost never checks notifications.

That “they can email me” mentality might be costing you clients—the same way a never-answered land line in my gym office cost me clients for about a decade. (Big mistake.)

Do This

You shouldn’t go out and delete your social-media platforms immediately. That would be rash. And you shouldn’t hire an army of people to monitor your accounts. That’s not feasible for a gym.

Here’s your 10-minute basic fix:

1. Go into each of your social media accounts and check your messages. Have you missed anything? Do the same thing with notifications on posts: Have you failed to respond to any comments? Clean up your backlog fast.

2. Add this line to the job description for one role in your business: “Check social inboxes and respond to messages and comments within 24 hours.” This task will likely take five or 10 minutes a day.

3. Brief the person who holds the role on the new standard. If you hold the role, add a daily calendar reminder to check messages. If you hate the idea, read this article from Chris Cooper and remember what he learned: “You always respond to messages fast. There’s always a $10,000 client on the line.”

Got More Time? Do This

Here’s a 60-minute upper-level plan, which might require investment or staffing adjustments:

1. Revisit your client avatar: Which social platforms do your ideal clients use? If you don’t know, ask your current best clients and assume people like them will use the same platforms.

2. Review your social platforms: Are you using the right ones regularly? Adjust as needed.

3. Determine a manageable posting and messaging schedule and carve it into your SOPs. The gold standard: responses within an hour. At minimum, respond within 24 hours.

4. Review your roles and tasks list to figure out the best way to ensure social media isn’t neglected. My suspicion: You could tack “social monitoring” onto the client success manager (CSM) role. Or perhaps you just need to get your current social media manager to respond to messages in a more timely manner.

Whatever you do, consider this your warning that modern consumers are going to make contact via their preferred systems, not yours. Smart business owners will take steps to make sure the right lines of communication are open for their ideal clients at all times.

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