The Gym Owners Blog/Podcast/Is Your Gym Ready for More Members? Answer These Questions First

Is Your Gym Ready for More Members? Answer These Questions First

Saturday, January 21, 2023

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EPISODE KEYWORDS

gym, people, coaching, clients, work, sell, nutrition, questions, membership, owners, supplements, posting, business, offer, easy, members, automation, creatine

OUTLINE

  • ​Introduction to today’s episode - 0:00
  • ​The importance of asking the right questions - 3:18
  • ​Don’t make the mistake that we often see talking with unsuccessful gym owners - 9:16
  • ​If you can’t sell it, you’re not getting good results - 11:17
  • ​Take what works for you - 17:19
  • ​What is your average supplement sales per member? - 19:33
  • ​If you’re worried about getting new members, this is an issue that you need to fix - 24:25
  • ​If you’re not doing it right, you are either just making it easy or you aren’t presenting them the upper things - 26:46
  • ​How many new sales opportunities do you get per month on average? - 32:00
  • ​Posting on social media without a plan to direct traffic to a specific type of program for a specific reason - 35:13
  • ​What are you doing for marketing? How much money are you spending? - 40:14
  • ​Is there something we can get like a swipe file or something that we can copy and paste and throw towards people? - 45:23

TRANSCRIPT

Tyler 00:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back gym owners podcast. I'm your host Tyler wherever there's John. Hi, John, how are you doing?



John Fairbanks 00:06

I am doing excellent.



Tyler 00:08

Good Guys, we got some good stuff for you today. Today we're going to get into some really specific subjects about a question we always ask people when they get ready to join our gear academy or whether we want any help with their gym. The question we always ask is, are you really ready for new members? And we've been building a thing for a while now. That will end up rolling out it's gonna be a bit yet, but we want to build some tools for you guys to come in and where we can actually say like, Alright, here's this list of questions, answer these all and then you're gonna really know like what you need to change before you can just she wanted to double your membership I want to be able to tell you like how much money you're leaving on the table by not fixing these things, or what problems are in the way so we want to make sure before we chase the wrong type of growth that we have the right foundation and today we're going to share with you a handful of these criteria are questions that we like to ask gym owners before we even consider working with them. And it's not that we won't work with people that don't check all these boxes the right way is this this is how we identify problems. So this is how we're going to identify if you are really ready to grow your membership base or if you kind of need some stuff to get in order for you to maximize those opportunities. So before we get started make sure you join the gym owners revolutions the Facebook group we share all sorts of cool fun information in there we get some dialogues and polls where like to be a resource for gym owners so we want to make sure that we create a good community gym owners helping each other answering each other's questions and not like a lot of those other gym owner fitness groups if y'all ever been in the rocks directly but like the functional fitness gym owner ones the big brand name one over holy shit is that just the worst people arguing about the worst things and like being really condescending a sucks. And that's not how we're doing it. So you go in there you feel awful about asking just a regular ask question or like trying to solve a regular strategy and just get shit on by a bunch of elitist with ABS whose business is probably fucking suck too. So the same one of those gyms where elitist with ABS whose businesses fucking rule. So John, let's get started right away. So one of the first questions we ask is about operations, right, making sure your gym can actually handle growth. What percentage of your gyms in person coaching is done by the owner? That's a question for you to answer, you should be aware of this as a gym owner, we don't see much over 25%, maybe 50%. If it's a really small scale thing that is even possible for you to be growing much if you're a coach and 75% of the hours that are going on in your floor, whether it's group or private training. What are you? Where's this going? That's always the question is where you get where's this going to you already busy? I would assume you're already busy. If that's the case. So we want to make sure that this isn't either of it, not where you're at on any of these questions. It's neither good nor bad. It's just where you are. Like all things, there's no good data, there's no bad data, there's just data. So I want to know where this is. Write this down with just let us know, if you want to write all these down and send them to us go for it. And we're not gonna do anything. But I'd love to hear the information. So we get our stuff built. But that's an



John Fairbanks 03:18

important trance. In our experience, every answer to one of these questions tells us volumes about where you are. And then what you say about your goal is what you want to do next. Well, it's very clear, we can easily see, hey, I want to do X, Y, or Z. Yeah. And like, Well, from what I've seen, from what we've seen, if you are coaching more than 50%, right, if you're coaching more than 70% of all of your in person classes, right? That's personal training, that's group classes. Something's gotta give, there's gotta be some changes. And that's where I think it's important. All these questions we're asking, from a perspective of how you want to grow. This is a profession, this is what you want to do to pay your bills, feed yourself, feed your family, take care of people in your community, there's something you're passionate about, about a deep, professional responsibility, and you want to grow. We've seen way too many gym owners that just, I want to take, I want to go to the stratosphere, I want to do the absolute best that I can to grow my business to do big things. And then we ask a couple of these questions that we're gonna go over today. And it's like, Oh, dude, yeah, we got a lot of things that we need to work on first, before you ever think about Facebook ads.



Tyler 04:43

And the big one on the coaching side of things is really that. The fact of the matter is, if you're coaching more than 25% of your hours, it's really tough for you to get over a million dollars a year. That's thing one, almost impossible in the grand scheme of things or just become comes, there's too much to manage, there's too many sliders to move forward, there's too many plates to spin, however you want to put it, for you to be bogged down on the coaching floor, you if you wanted to be a career coach, you should have stayed out of the gym ownership business, they're not always the same thing. And success in one thing does not always mean that you're gonna be successful at the other thing. So you just need to know you need to have a scalable systems mindset. So when it comes to coaching and personal stuff, coaching is your passion, good coach, you got to understand that you're not going to have the impact that you want to have the value you want to have in your community, and then get that value back in return monetarily from your community, unless you're able to detach yourself from this a little bit. So you got to teach. So you got to get somebody coaching for you, you got to be able to impart your skills on to somebody else and allow them to carry on that your coaching strategies out on the floor, or rails how good of a fucking coach are you if you can only do it yourself, and you can't ever bring anyone else into the fold. So onto the next piece? Do you offer a separate nutritional service for new clients when they come in? Or for existing clients? If the answer to that is no, that's probably a big opportunity. You're leaving on the table, we have an episode a couple times back about the one product that you start selling that well, whatever, double your closing ticket price, and this is that product. It's very simple. And people know when they come in they very rarely are people completely deluded and think that I just need to exercise. And that's the only thing that's keeping me fucking fat is that I don't exercise. People don't believe that. They just don't know people. Yeah, you like shit. Not only do they know, they eat like shit, they probably kind of know that if they just ate a little bit differently and ate some different things that they'd be fine that they would start making progress. But they don't. And what they want is that solution to just be told to them, they want to plan, they want something on paper that they can adhere to, they want this product, told you my wife and I 98% 98% of the clients that we've dealt with now in the last year and a half have all chosen some separate nutritional stuff. Even ones that don't do it on the first day. And the first time we close them, they do it inevitably, because after eight weeks, they make progress, they get a little momentum we say guys, there's a lot more to be unlocked here, fix your food. So it's a tremendous opportunity. The other side of this is what percent of your new clients purchase a nutrition service. And what does that tell us? If that number is really low? John?



John Fairbanks 07:26

If the numbers really low, you're not offering an offer and you're just not



Tyler 07:30

offering it. The amount of gym owners who answer yes to that first question. Do you offer separate service to your clients, but come back and say, Yeah, but only like one out of every 30 buys or we haven't had anybody buy it? Yeah, you're not really offering it, you have it. And you don't sell it systematically. And it's no different than all of these other things that people do is you don't turn this thing into a system that doesn't fucking exist, dude. It just doesn't exist. Like being a there's a big difference between going out and low on somebody's lawn for them being a nice guy and going out and mowing everybody's lawn every fucking day like mowing lawns everyday systematically. Right one's gonna get a lot of fucking lawn mowed, the other guy is gonna probably get bored after a day or two day or two and is going to move on right you need to treat this thing like a thing you want to do a lot of twins it needs to be corresponded with every new client that comes in needs to get it needs to see it. That's a numbers game. Quit being a fucking worse get worried about being so worried about getting told no. Every person said, Do you want to make some changes to your food? Food habits? What do you want to do? We have a service here, like, this should be something that everybody gets to choose yes or no to. And if they don't, you as a gym owner are making a huge mistake for your pocketbook. These systems are scalable nutrition stuff fairly scalable to sell. You don't have to make it cookie cutter. But you can just give someone a plan, maybe charge a one off if there's lots of different ways to do nutrition stuff we talked about. And some of our Gear Academy people do one off stuff similar to what I do. Here's a plan: Go forward, go forth and be excellent. And some do continuing coaching with accountability and habits and stuff built into that. Either way, it should not be a thing that costs you a ton of time. It should just be something that is valuable to the customer and fits their wants.



John Fairbanks 09:16

Don't make the mistake that we see so often when we talk with gym owners that are doing this unsuccessfully. Do you have a nutrition product that you're selling? Oh yeah, we've got it. Okay, great. What's been the success and it's low, just like you said, Okay, if it's low. We all love equipment. If you're a gym owner, you've spent a lot of time thinking about the equipment. It's going to be in your gym. Could you imagine buying the back hyper machine and then just sticking it in the back? Never bring it out? Do you have a back hyper while I do. Well, great. Where is it? Oh, it's in the back. We don't use it. Well then what the fuck? Yeah, that's exactly the equivalent so don't be Idiot, if you have a thing, then fucking use that thing.



Tyler 10:04

Yeah, there's also this thing that can make your money. By the way, finding the reverse hyper was your dumbass idea that's on your guns, but everyone out there has a husband's great cupholder. But again, if you needed that if you bought that thing thinking it was gonna get you new memberships or something like that you're crazy. But your nutrition service can make you money, it exists to make you money, and to get some results, and you are leaving it in the back closet. That's nuts.



John Fairbanks 10:27

And that's exactly what I wanted to hit on the nutrition thing, this product that you can offer people, this particular piece. You and I are very passionate, for a reason for why we say Stop fucking talking about that you need more members, you need more money. Now a lot of us think about it that way. But we need to understand where you are at? What do you want to achieve? Now stop fucking thinking about it in the number of members. And this is probably one of the definitely top two things you can do in your gym. That can completely shatter any feeling of I need more members in order to get more money in my gym. Yeah, yeah, because holy shit.



Tyler 11:17

And if you can't sell it, and you can't renew it, or you're not getting good results, so your nutrition product sucks. So just make it better, right. And by the way, you're not going to make it better by not selling it to the next person you talk to about their nutrition. If you'd like some nutrition coaching, make up a fucking number out of thin air, I don't even care. But close somebody on it. Don't be pushy, but just close it because trust me, they'll want it they just want they do sorry. If they're coming to a general fitness place they want. They want coaching, if they're going to a place to do coaching, not just say 24 hours. But if you do coaching, I promise you at least more than half would buy it if it was offered to them the right way. So get one, just get one and then do a good job. And by the way, that one may be laborious, it may be labor intensive, it may take you more time and effort than you want it to be for it to be scalable, but you're going to get them results. You're going to learn what works and what doesn't. And you're going to learn what takes you too much time, you're going to systemize your way around that stuff, you're also going to standardize most of your correspondence. So a lot of the basic stuff can be copied and pasted. And then as it scales in the long run, it's easier for you to manage, you also need nutrition results for you to sell nutrition. Meaning you need before and after pictures. You need testimonials. It's the same reason we talk about testimonials for everything in your gym. But if you're going to sell nutrition even internally, you need some testimonials. One of the best things I've heard and this was from some gym lodge folks, I think it was on one of their podcasts. But they were talking about what these guys would do, they had to start completely over in the fitness industry. And you know what the most clever idea I heard was, they just rent out an office space, or it's just an office and they would have transformation photos on the wall behind them. And they would just run Facebook ads and they would sell at home workouts, programs and nutrition. That's it, and you would just be a selling machine. And then none of it required hardly any work. And that's the way to make a fortune in this industry. Right? Transformation photos, sell transformations work. Okay, so you need to sell, you need to get it moving in order for you to have proof of concept. And then just tune it up as you go. Now do not wait for your thing to be perfect, because it's not right now just sell it and figure out my nutrition program that I sell now is much tighter, much more concise, much more of a premium feeling that it was the first time around. But I was charged more not once I figured Oh, now it's worth my discharge.



John Fairbanks 13:45

will fuck Tyler if I have to sell nutrition to someone, get them results, before I can really, really be able to sell it, I got to be able to prove that I can do it. It's a little bit like a graduate with my college degree. And in order to be able to get the good job, I need to have five years of experience, but I have no fucking experience. Get an internship possible, so don't be a goddamn moron. Instead, if you don't have a client right now that's going to be able to do your nutrition shit. Do your own nutrition show. Get somebody else, get your wife, get your spouse, get your girlfriend, get your goddamn coaches to do your nutrition program and get a before and after picture. And you know you're done. Yeah, now you have everything you need to be able to take the next step. And this really takes us into the next question we ask everybody is Do you sell supplements?



Tyler 14:45

And we've been this one? We've been this one up a lot, but the answer should be yes. And if it's not, it should be I'm working on it. There's a lot of great supplement companies out there that work out really good deals for you with lots of flexible options. I can start keeping a lot of these strategies in house for our gear Academy people because they're just too productive. And I give enough of that away but on the specific supplement sales stuff, we want that you want to take advice you want to pay for, fucking start selling, start trying to you need to start carrying it, offering it you just start trying to sell it. It needs to be a part of your thing. Don't gotta be pushy about it, but these people want it. I made a post the other day on Instagram about just what my daily nutrition intake was. Here's the food I take, here's a supplement. Take them one, three people messaged me about just a supplement. By the way, none of these were supplements that were like supplements. Some of them were just vitamins like vitamin D and taking some creatine annotates isn't that as like, but I had people like, oh, I took notes on this, I'm gonna try and build this thing. And I had the person actually Oh, why do you take these? And these are? Or where do you get these and a lot of the stuff I was like, I can fuck these ones specifically, but I take half of them, I get them bulk supplements on frickin Amazon because I just want vitamin D for cheap. And I want magnesium for cheap. So I get three years of it for 60 bucks or whatever. But the thing is humans, their interest is in what their interest is in K, it just is and taking supplements is easier. Let's talk about the when it comes to value, right speed of results effort required to make the results and the likelihood of someone getting those results. So Hormoz Ethan, right. That's kind of the value thing. Wait, that's his value equation, right? Well, man taking supplements is a hell of a lot easier than working out with some hard ass in the gym for three days a week or four days a week, right? That's tough. It's also probably cheaper in the long run. And maybe the results are not as guaranteed. But like, they can almost kind of justify that in their head. That math still works for people, which is why plenty of people who don't even work out will like to start taking protein powder or what's the first thing someone does, when they start kind of maybe working out. They maybe get a little bit of the hitch and they're like, ah, should I start taking creatine or like, you know, I'll start taking BCAAs so my PE can be expensive, because they just don't know. So we beat up the millions. But psychologically,



John Fairbanks 17:09

psychologically, you gotta be there for we capitalize on it. Why? What does every little kid do when they get a brand new pair of shoes? It puts the shoes on? They go Mom and Dad Look how fast I am. Yep. The new shoes make them faster. It's fucking science. Science. The same way. Man I feel so jacked because I just took jacked HD



Tyler 17:43

Jack Jax GH.



John Fairbanks 17:48

Yeah, same thing.



Tyler 17:49

Yeah. And I think that it's just one of the things and I've touched on a lot but like, you know, they're gonna go to some idiot who doesn't lift and they're gonna buy some overpriced shit. That's nonsense. And if you're, you're in the business, you're a professional you know a little bit about food and training and what's right like, if I can be that for somebody please. You dumb ass. Okay, sell it, try to sell it. By the way, don't just have it on your shelf. Try sell it say if someone's asking you about what you take first off, take stuff that works find out what works for you what helps supplements are tough for even for me to say I took this and it changed the game there's not much other than fucking hormones that you take that you just go yes, there is a before that I really noticed was way different than the after. Other than that you started taking creatine you're gonna No, no, but you notice pretty well studied is super affordable. So as far as if you're gonna you're definitely probably not pissing money away. If you're going to start taking creatine, right we can all probably agree that science is probably settled on that. So that's an easy one to start with creatine protein multivitamins. None of these are fucking crooked shit. So be the guy told that you got a small guy who's a hard gainer. And he goes to GNC and gets a mascot mass monster. 3000 or mass monster 8000 or Russian? What is a Russian bear? Whatever it is like Yes.



John Fairbanks 19:05

Tastes like you.



Tyler 19:10

You gotta be the best students.



John Fairbanks 19:11

I had students that went and got the mass gainer. And they go I go, how does it taste? You go like Satan's anus. That's accurate. That's exactly what I was like.



Tyler 19:21

Yeah, it's just like a pile of dextrose. And, the lowest quality protein out there. And it just sucks man.



John Fairbanks 19:27

So the immediate lead up question is do you sell supplements? Great. Yes. Awesome. You feel good about yourself. The next question is, what is your average supplement sales per member? Right? Don't try it, you don't have to divide by pie or anything complex. Just take your monthly supplement sales and divide that by the total number of clients that you have. It is your math if you are selling less than $20 per month. Are you actually selling supplements right now? Yeah?



Tyler 20:03

Or do you have like five people that are into it, and you don't even bother, because you should get a ton of people spending anywhere from 50 to 80 bucks, a ton of them, some will do zero, some will always be zero. That's their budget, it doesn't work. But a ton of them will fall in that 50 to 80 range. And you will have outliers that will spend two to one to 300. So that your average should be, I'd like you to be more than 20. And if it's not, it's good, because the what we do with this stuff, these questions, we're asking you to identify opportunities for growth, low hanging fruit, it's easy to change, easy to scale, and easy to start growing your business that don't require you to fucking intake a bunch of new clients and burn yourself out faster. Or worse. Even worse, if you're already kind of stretched on time. You're just going to underperform and kill your reputation. You need to be good, you got to be good. You can't be in there tired, not giving a fuck about your people. Because all you do is coach and your business isn't fun for you anymore. So that's really important. Next one, what is your new client membership price to join the gym, this is just simply for your membership rate, your base membership, and this is really not necessarily a good nor bad. This just kind of tells us what your market is kind of right. Because if you're, you know, over 275 bucks for a standard membership, we just probably know you're in a higher higher tax or an area where most people are in higher tax brackets or at least that's your target audience, right? You're in the equinox competitive market versus the 130 year $100 Or less group, which now we start playing a game where we're flirting with competing with 24 hour gyms that have way better equipment than you. And now we start to conflate these differences between coaching and just equipment and you start to get tricky. So when you're when you're priced the same as a place that likes, does way less than you or just offers way less than you. People don't know, you're not going to get the opportunity to explain that in a way that makes sense. That's the best strategy. I read. The other CrossFit gym in town, I thought there were a bunch of schmucks. It was run by essentially a nonprofit so that we're not incentivized to do good to be good or whatever. And I just charged 150% of what they charged, if they raise their price up, my price went up. It was a fixed rate that I charged 50% more than they do. So it's very easy. Well, why are you more expensive, I was like, Oh, I kind of just let that speak for itself. You know, that is what it is. And also people are probably shopping and they want the $90 a month CrossFit gym or the $100 a month CrossFit gym. Go for it. If you're shopping for cheap, you can have it. Because if you won't even give the expensive guy the time of day on the front end knowing, by the way, knowing that usually that's how things go, then I'm not interested in dealing with your bullshit. So it is very easy for me to do it. Second one, though, however, go ahead, John.



John Fairbanks 22:53

No is leading into this. The first question is good just to know where you are. But it's more relevant because of this next question. Because what we're about to compare, and what we want you thinking about is, what is your average client sales price? So for new clients, what's the average sale price? Right at closing? How much money are you making? Here's the hint, it shouldn't be the same as your new client membership price. Yeah, to join the gym.



Tyler 23:29

Yeah, if people are coming in at 150 bucks to join your gym, right, and they're not picking any other products. Your sales process is broken, your offer presentation system is broken, or your sales guy is just taking, taking the easy road. You're not offering, you're not offering a stacked offer. Your other offerings are not presented in a way that people like, there's a lot of other things going on there. But that's a big one. If this, by the way, look at this math. Yeah, this is a bit you can do this mentally unless you close a shit ton of new people, right. So just think back on your last 10 new sales. So you may be able to look at your last 10 new members joined to your last 10 new accounts that you've set up and just see how much they paid on that day and divide that by 10. Right. But let's figure that out. And by the way, I'd like you to do that over the course of the year. But just on closing, you know, recurring stuff comes up and down, we can go back to the well, your existing client well. And those are numbers we flush out later. But we want to know because again, if you're worried about getting new members, this is an issue that you need to fix. We can worry about what's going on internally at month 3456 And all those opportunities later. But if you're gonna get a bunch of new members here, and you're just laying fucking eggs drop and just closing base level memberships over and over and over and over again. You're leaving so much money on the table because again, we've talked about this should probably be it should average practically double what your membership is. Fact is it really should I and maybe more than that, at least that first least that first bump really should. And that's super important that difference, the delta between those two is the thing that's the most important.



John Fairbanks 25:10

We've I think it's fair, you and I have made this mistake before, and our own businesses. We've also seen this mistake made several times with clients either that we, they have wanted to work with us, or we started working with them. And we saw, this is an error. We've seen when gym owners have brought on new salespeople to come in and they start selling. And we immediately start looking at the numbers and Tyler's you call immediate bullshit on these numbers don't make sense. Don't be a fucking idiot. Why I've had



Tyler 25:51

to say Quit fucking lying to me, or they are lying to you. And this is the truth if your offer stack exists as a way that we will then like to construct it, of course. But this is even aside from our multi-layer, the interactive sales app that we have now that people use that allows everybody at every level of commitment, they can like, gradually choose their way in, they can have upsell opportunities for every single possible desire that they would have in the gym. It just maximizes that thing, crushes in every aspect of the way, but even a single page with a five, five offers on it, right tiered offers. If it's done, right, and if you've paid attention thus far, and what services could kind of be if you're selling more than if more than 20, or 25%, probably of your new closing is buying your base membership. You are not doing it right. You're either just making it easy, you're not presenting them the upper things, you don't get to be slick, either. You just gotta put it in front of them, and talk to them and answer questions when it's there. I know that your sales weed so we'll go through a case very specifically, we went through all we were getting with this Jim was like, we were just closing all these base ones. And I know the gym owner was an ace when he was doing stuff. We were closing big tickets, big tickets, big ticket stuff, it was everybody buying. It was great. I knew. But we then had to start teaching the salespeople so that his sales team could do this job just like coaching so he could move on to all these other things. In order to scale to grow the business, you gotta not do all the things. So we were working this handoff. We had two two salespeople on this team. And I'm looking back I'm like, Okay, what is your last hand and we just brought it up casually on a call. It wasn't even about this. I'm like, What are your last 10? New sales? How is it going? Because we're paying for ads at the time too. And I needed to know what these numbers were. And all of them. Every one of them was based on reports. Like shit, I said, and right away, it just didn't sit with me. And I said, Something's going on, reach out, we got to find out what is happening, what are they offering. And sure enough, what it was is what they were trying to get as much of it done over the phone. So they didn't have to meet people in person, which I'm not totally opposed to if you got them on the phone to talk to them. But you can't take the easy road because they want more than that. If you're only offering it you're probably also getting told not a lot because you're only presenting one thing and it doesn't check all the boxes of other needs. They want accountability, they want nutrition that increases their value equation on the side of the likelihood of success. Right? It just really increases it. And so when we go through that it was like oh, they're just trying to do it over the phone to save time and because they could just throw a number in this person's way they could just throw a number, get a yes or no and move on. Versus meeting with somebody talking about what maybe they actually want to accomplish and presenting your services as the solution to that problem. And they were laying eggs do just eggs and by the way we spent five grand a month on fucking Facebook ads at this time staff and so had they been playing the game once we corrected it that average sale price tripled. Wow, does that make an impact on the successful on the successful success or failure of your fucking adspend course and it's not about raising prices it's about giving people choices so if your closing average sale price is way too close to your base membership only you need to give people more options and give them options present them options give them the choice to spend more money with you if you're not What are you doing like that then you're definitely not ready leaving money on the table.



John Fairbanks 29:30

Yeah, stop learning this the hard way. Yeah, we've already we already know we've done it a whole bunch of times



Tyler 29:35

There's a reason I can smell this out by numbers. I can just see the numbers and I can know that you're lying or your salespeople are lying or what you're. I can know what your sales process is and what these clients are experiencing by simply seeing what tear a package people are buying. I know I can smell it because I've done it a fucking million times and fitness and heating and air conditioning and online services into fucking other service industries. In these other ancillary clients, we do marketing and fucking offer systems for guys just fucking Don't, don't fall on your face in this thing, you when this works, when this starts clicking, when that thing starts clicking, man, you're gonna go fuck, this was so easy. That's the thing you guys was so easy to make so much money, that's the thing you got to do, you built the hard part is the stuff you've already done, you built the gym, you got the skill set you've earned the trust will be a fucking idiot here and just leave this fucking money on the table because you're afraid to what to like own the fact that you're good and expect just to put something in front of something and expect them to throw it back in your face. People want the shit that you sell, you're good. So next one, what percent of your members are paying for personal training? Now this is not, this really is not necessarily a metric that is good nor bad. Like most things, this just lets us know, are there opportunities, this goes kind of hand in hand with how much coaching hours, you're actually on what percentage of coaching time you're spending on the floor as well, if you're selling a ton of PT, then I just know that there your room for growth, it just is going to be dependent on that. And there can be additional services layered into that gym that has almost no PT, maybe has opportunities to bring in a coach and selling PT to that through that coach is a good way to fill in time versus the group fitness time as well. It also makes it easier for you if you're able to sell PT to create a more lucrative offer for new coaches that come in. It's important, none is good nor bad. As far as this way. There's just some studios and some gyms and studios have a ratio that's much different than others. And this is just where we can know kind of where you sit, what types of stuff you're into, and who your clients are. It also can tell us a bit, though like well, maybe you're just not offering it. I know a lot of places that just don't just don't offer it very often it just is what it is. And it may be just because you don't want to do it, maybe you don't have the time, then maybe it just needs to be more expensive for you. Or maybe you need to delegate out and you need to get new staff in to start to handle that stuff.



John Fairbanks 32:06

None of the questions we ask are isolated. They don't live on a single Island. This question relates back to three other questions that we have already gone over. It starts to paint a picture for us because in our experience, what we've seen, every gym owner that we work with, there are milestones and thresholds that you need to be hitting to be maximizing the volume, and maximizing the revenue that you already have, like the people you already have. There should be a point where you're hitting a ceiling, you are hitting a certain number, and every one of these questions gets answered a certain way tells us immediately. Okay, where are they at? What range? Are they at? What do they need to do next? To push them past that plateau? That ceiling that they're at?



Tyler 32:56

Yeah, we're just here to identify opportunities. Speaking of opportunities, the next question is, how many new sales opportunities do you get per month on average, right? And this is, this can be a product of your marketing success and failure, this may be a product of just simple traffic, you know, it may fluctuate wildly. We just want to know how many you get? Because we then want to know how many of you are close , right? How many new sales opportunities do you get per month, whether it's 10, or less 20, or more five or less, whatever that is, but that number kind of matters, right? It just really does. If you're not getting any, then what's the point of us re-skinning a bunch of other stuff? Maybe we need to focus primarily on nudging some things forward with leads. Right? That's kind of the main thing. Are you trying to generate leads? Are you tracking it at all?



John Fairbanks 33:42

What do they look like? Let's start at the very beginning. In our experience, if you're not tracking your numbers, then what fuck are you doing?



Tyler 33:52

You will have your contact information from every single person who comes in to maybe talk to you about joining a gym, write down their name and get their phone number or email, and then get started with talking to them. Right? That's super easy, because then if they tell you No, three months later, shoot everybody who told you no, in the last three months that message Hey, so what if you ever found a spot for you to sit to see whether you'll shake out a handful of people every quarter? And someone will mean, this is a foolproof recipe. That's actually probably worth an extra two to four grand a year, give or take, just simply getting that information up front. So how many sales opportunities do you get per month and then we just kind of determine what we can do to fill in those gaps? How many new clients join your gym per month, which is easy math here. How many new members have you enrolled in the last year? Divide that by 12. That's simple. The next one: how many clients does your gym lose in a month? Same math just how many people went out the door by 12 I don't care if it's super high. That can be layered. There can be lots of things COVID has thrown a lot of that shit off to depending on where you're at. It's just you know things are sometimes that your new clients number may trend way up because your areas bounce going back from COVID, when some maybe had done that already two years ago. So this just lets us know how things are trending either good or bad. The next one, though, that matters is what are you currently doing for marketing? And be honest? The first answer that I see a lot doing nothing, doing nothing, you're not trying, you're just an even if you're just generically kind of posting on social media, without like, an actual call this way, if you're posting on social media without a plan, without a plan to direct traffic to direct a specific type of person, to a specific type of program of yours, for a specific reason, can be free, right? You know, it'd be painful. But if that's your social media, if your social media plan does not involve a specific person, specific program or offer for a specific reason, then you are doing nothing, you're just checking boxes, you're just posting on social media. That's what you're doing. And that's not a thing either, so I lump that in with nothing. Okay, yes, you're worse than nothing. You're wasting your time and energy.



John Fairbanks 36:07

Ruin, I will tell you that nothing is really important, because very seldom Tyler, if we're being honest, in our experience, very seldom does a gym owner tell us that they're doing nothing. Yeah, they use GIMP for marketing. Lots of words.



Tyler 36:23

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Or they'll say marketing. I've been doing some marketing and marketing. I look at it. And I look around and I'm like, You're wondering, well, how much is paying as well? Nothing is okay. And then look at what they're not doing. You're not doing anything. So that's very easy for him to see



John Fairbanks 36:38

He posted on social media in two years. Yeah. Digital Marketing are you doing?



Tyler 36:43

Exactly now, one that works that will still allow is, again, if it has a plan, if you're posting something directed towards a specific type of person about a specific program for a specific reason. You want to lose weight, as you put on some pandemic pounds, come in and join their jam. We got some nutrition coaching as well to get that weight off for you, and get you back feeling the way you used to before 2020 hit. Let's go. A lot of us have been there. Right? All right. If you're posting shit like that, that is I consider doing something. So that's organic posting, by the way, that's just organic social media action. I'll allow that. Because by the way, that's what bootstrapping it is but don't conflate posting for no reason about whatever, just pictures of people exercising, as that ship has sailed, posting pictures of groups of people after classes that ship has sailed? No, there's too much of it out there. Nobody zooms in to see all the faces, it doesn't matter, doesn't move, the needle catches no attention. Nobody cares. Okay, same thing on the organic side of things. I was like, You need to be posting something. So if it's a picture person, fine exercise or fine, whatever. But what's it about? What's it about the person seeing how you get in front of new people, if you're using this on Facebook, you're just posting it on Instagram to Phil's people's feeds, right? But that's organic, free social media, I'll count that that counts. If you're posting with a plan, and you're not paying to run ads, you're trying to say, hey, I reached out to you, a great strategy that I had posted in the Gear Academy. This is from Stuart Brower, who I know is a direct competitor to us, probably, he's probably been around the longest in our businesses, too. But he has WTF gym talk out there. But Stuart browser, again, because he cusses. And he's kind of a real dude. And anyway, whatever the thing is, I'm not going to not share stuff that's going to be helpful to our people. Because that's not my idea. Right? That's just just, that's not what I'm about to do. Right. And so he had posted a thing that I had posted about, which is a thing that Hunter was using, which is every like on one of your posts, who's not one of your members, like it's not an accident. So look at who those people are. Literally, if it's on Instagram, or if it's on Facebook, see who likes it, who hasn't joined your gym? If it's a picture of one person extra, you should have a message. Okay, I don't know, his strategy was, hey, I don't know if you know, Steve or not, but I saw you electric for your thing. You know, thanks for sharing. I don't know how you know, but you know, thanks for sharing love, hope you had a great day. That type of stuff works really, really, really, really, really well. And so while I know he's probably a competitor of ours, and I don't want to shove you off to do business with the guy necessarily, but I've never been one to shit on a good idea because it wasn't mine. And I'm certainly not going to try to pass that idea off as though it was mine. But it reminds me of what Hunter was doing where he was seeing people liking and viewing his stories and then he would just learn a little about that person and you'd get to see some trends and who those people are then you would make some posts that are catered to that type of person more often. And then next thing you know, sure enough, that person reaches out there's no fucking accident. When you find a brand and you like, Oh, should I love this stuff and all of a sudden you're shopping on their online store. The research has been done, whether they're paying for Facebook to do it, or whether they're doing the digging themselves is a different story. But that's a great organic strategy that's actually trying as well. I like to move further. What do you do for marketing paid digital ads? Facebook, Instagram ads, Google Ads worse networking events, business clubs, trade shows, community events, I like direct to home marketing, mailers, door hangers, you know, out of home marketing billboards, put fliers out blankets stuff banners out. So, but you're doing radio or you're doing TV. But think about your hyper localization as what you should be local, local, local, local. So, what are you doing for marketing to check any or all these that apply? Okay, what you should be doing some of it, then the next is how much money you're spending on marketing, on average, the last 12 months, I don't care what it is, I just need to know what it is. Right? That's all. So we just need to know, because that tells us the scale of the game you're playing. If we think that you're spending money on shit, this may be not producing which we don't even get into efficacy of this at this here, which is because I don't expect the people that are in front of us to really, really know truly and be tracking they caught their current cost to acquire a new member, how much they spend on marketing versus how much it gets, though you should? In the long run, you should? That's all this is a question I have for that. And then on the back end stuff. Now we have operations questions. And this. Which back end systems do you use? Are you using it? Are you using stuff for account membership planning, membership management, like this would be your Wodify, pushpress, planner, kilo, whatever else is out there for processing memberships? If you're chasing people down for money, if you're running just everything through your square payments, stuff like how are you? Are you handling recurring memberships? If you're not automating the recurring memberships, or even the recurring monthly stuff for personal training, just make it easy. Every time someone has to reach into their car to be Oh, yeah, sure here and re up, that's a moment where they have to consider whether they still want to deal with you or not. And especially if people aren't around or they're busy. That's it costs you one week, two weeks a revenue, it just does cash flow is king, you leave a lot of money on the table by not automating that stuff. And for you as a gym owner, you're the one that has to do that ship. And that's a lot of chasing people around. So you have to have a back end system for those reasons. The other side of that is for email correspondence, how can you email all your members about a new program you sell? How are you going to do it? So this just lets us know is like, if you don't have one of these, it's a thing where we want to get you moving on something, I don't care what they are, it's important for you to know that I've been in lots every business, John, that you've been a part of in education, every business that I've been a part of in any capacity has like a full on operating system or to write a third party software that manages accounts and manages billing and handles this and what has to integrate with all the other shit that they do. And they all are authority on your side, they all suck for a dozen reasons. And you're going to want, you're going to want so bad for a different one to be better. And it will be for those reasons. And then when you go through all the trouble of transitioning to another one, you're going to hate the next one for 12 different reasons. Just know that that's the game you'll play. You'll switch these things a few times over the life of a business, but just know one of those has to exist, it's gonna suck, they're all gonna kind of suck, take the good with the bad, just know that it's better than you're doing it all manually, trust me.



John Fairbanks 43:11

And if you don't have anything yet, right, this is an idea where like, fuck, I've been thinking about it. The only advice that we give based on what we have seen across tons of gyms, make sure it has the ability to scale with you. Yeah, the more things you do bootstrapper you do a little bit here a little bit there. And now you have to kind of string everything together, use duct tape to tie one to the other, the more pain you're going to have as you look to scale. Yeah. So just know, pick, do your research, ask other gym owners to join the group, come into the gym owners revolution, ask, Hey, what's everybody using for, you know, these main core areas? And they'll give it, they'll give you the feedback and tell you the good, the bad and the ugly.



Tyler 44:02

Yeah, do you also use lead nurturing or automated scheduling system to like you know, lead nurturing, basically is just essentially somebody gives you a form and there's plenty there's a handful these out there, Jim leads machine is one that comes to mind some of our gear Academy people mess with that one of the kinds of your website and stuff and then allow someone comes in and fills out the form. So yeah, I'm interested in getting started. And what it is, if you don't you get told that somebody fills out that form, and then the automations handle everything else and it's just to get them to the appointment. And that means sending them a message the morning of like, hey, great to see it. We'll see at seven o'clock today. Here's the address. It sets the expectation that it does all that stuff so that you don't have to, which again, if you're only getting one or two leads a month, three, four leads a month, five leads a month. It's not a big deal for you if you want 30 as a lot of back and forth trying to get people to appointments and you're going to have to fall off because you're not going to be as good at nurturing them from that moment to the appointment. The other side is a more manual way to do that would be something saved Just like Calendly, where you can set up a few little automations. And you could send someone a link and say, Hey, make an appointment here and blah, blah, blah, and then you let Calendly kind of handle it from there, because you can then trigger the email that they get right after, you can trigger an email that they're gonna get right before the appointment. And that can do so that's kind of a less comprehensive way to do that, as well. So highly recommend some of those, the other guy, John,



John Fairbanks 45:23

there's one thing on this on this point of the email and automation piece that I want to call out, we got asked in the group earlier this week, somebody was looking for, hey, is there something we can get like you have the gut, you guys have these ideas is there like a swipe file or something, we can copy and paste and throw towards people to be able to kind of take action towards one of these ideas that you guys have thrown out there, specifically dealing with nutrition. And there's a good way of doing this. And there's a bad way of doing this automation, automations can be a four letter word. So if all you're looking for is a copy and paste solution that's working, just generally, Fuck man, Google it, you can go find it all over the place, everybody's got some shitty thing that you can copy and paste and execute on. But there is a piece where you do want some of that hand holding on the automation side, to help kind of foster and bring people into your world and make sure you just have natural touch points. That man, you don't want to automate yourself out of your business. Yeah,



Tyler 46:27

absolutely. And when you start building automations, like that, or when they're built for you make sure you go in and you can control a bit of the tone, I mean, you can edit some of the copy, and just gonna be like, this isn't quite how I want it to be also get your skin out of your own way a little bit too, because kind of the way, it's sometimes the way we are is the reason people aren't is the reason thing, we're not closing people were the reason people aren't showing up, it's probably just you and the way you are. So sometimes you want to just let the automation be a little more positive, a little more be maybe a little more direct or simple or, or whatever it needs to be just know that that system also probably is a bit more tuned up. And in tune to the patterns of humans more than more than more than you are, unless you're already crushing it. The other one be email marketing software, MailChimp, Constant Contact, some of that stuff you can do within your account membership management stuff, but just what are you using to contact your existing members, former members leads that have fallen off, how do you? How were you doing that? And if you're not, just find a way to make sure that was done. This list that we presented today identifies most of the questions that we have. There are plenty more than we work with people directly. We identify some of the more direct pains, the individual pains that go on in their gym. And we actually help them solve all those micro problems while dealing with some of these macro ones here. But if you really paid attention here to this list, this list of questions here. You should very much identify a ton of opportunities. If you've been paying attention to the show at all over the last few months or a year, you should definitely identify like shit, a lot of money on the table. And one of the things we do in the gear Academy is we don't just allow a problem to be a problem. I don't. I don't allow you to come in and say just are not good enough members. And I just wish I had more members, I'm not making enough money, I need the steps. Okay, great. What do we want to do about it, because I am not met, my wife comes home sometimes. And she'll have a problem. There's that and this person felt this way, or whatever it is. And I being the worst kind of husband, I immediately go into problem solving mode, I perfect fuck this guy, fuck, that guy will change this thing, these people suck. Fuck that it's over, we'll burn this thing out. And we'll redirect here and then we plan this and then you can do this, this, this and this. And both of these problems are cut out by these people, whatever whatever it may be. I will just go into problem solving mode. Here are your five options for solving this problem. Take a pick away, do all the math, it's probably the worst. Because when your wife comes home and says that she doesn't want you to solve the problem. She wants to feel heard. She wants to feel so that you can know how she feels you can feel that it was felt right. But that's not what I do in the Career Academy because I'm not your fucking husband. So you guys come into the thing. And there's a problem. Great, cool, but I am not here to just go. Oh, shucks. Let's just live with it forever, huh? Okay, what we're here to do here is fix it. So look at all these questions that you guys get answered here today. There are tons of opportunities there. If you want to work with us in the gear Academy, we will have you executing next week on fixing one thing that we prioritize in the next week in the next week in the next week in the next week. Till over the course of the year, you'll have businesses producing on just an entirely different level than you could imagine at this point. If you're not ready to join the gear Academy because you don't have the money to do it. Perfect. We've identified some low hanging fruit for you here in today's episode, fix a few of those things. Once you're producing yourself an extra few 100 bucks a month getting the gear Academy let's just level your shit up. Let's go. So I gave you the tools to cover that gap if you can't afford what we're doing here. And so go do it and then we'll level it up for you Thanks for listening everybody join the Facebook group links in the description follow me on Instagram at Tyler Evans don't follow the show at the gym owners podcast on Instagram at John



John Fairbanks 50:08

at Jay banks f L on Instagram



Tyler 50:12

guys thanks a lot for listening and we'll see you next week later



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