Track THESE Numbers to Grow Your Gym

gym, leads, work, business, metrics, client, sales, matters, owners, content, putting, fitness, move, week, product, numbers, track, staying

Tyler 00:01

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week's episode of the gym owners podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Stone over there, John Fairbanks. How's it going, John,



John Fairbanks 00:08

it's going well,



Tyler 00:09

guys, this week we're gonna talk about some of the metrics numbers you need to be keeping track of when it comes to getting new clients get new leads this there's a process from beginning to end that you need to keep track of, or else it just kind of happens to you, on you, near you, around you. If you don't keep track of that you don't have control over the influx of people coming within your business, what they buy, that it actually be profitable, and that the programs that you're putting them are the right fit for them, and that they're decent, and that we're fulfillment in the protocol and on the floors worth of shit. So this is kind of this thread, helps you map the client journey completely from beginning to end while also being the word giving you control a little bit, giving you the ability to go out if there's a problem. And this is if these if this data is not understood, or at least if you don't, if you're not tracking it. Now, it's not a big deal. But if you're not, if you don't begin to track it, you're not gonna have a really hard time making any changes or improving any of these things. This is the data we use to identify problems in a business flow from lead generation all the way onto the fulfillment side. So lead generation to retention, beginning and top to bottom. These are the few metrics that matter. Most in John and I's opinion. Before we get started, make sure you go to gym owners revolution.com there we've got the gear Academy gear academies where we coach gym owners, directly all month long we go, we go deep, we go into exactly what you guys need exactly what you guys want to be working on, and exactly what your business needs now. So no lofty bullshit, putting the cart in front of the horse. Let's just get moving. So that's what we do in the gear Academy, tomorrow's revolution.com Get in the Facebook group, we got a bunch of exciting shit going on there. That is linked in the description as well follow the show at the gym owners podcast follow me on Instagram at Tyler F and stone and John,



John Fairbanks 02:01

you can follow me on Instagram at J banks f L.



Tyler 02:05

We also have an online store now for cool. It's not just gym owners revolution and gym owners podcast stuff



John Fairbanks 02:13

is our face really big. Sure,



Tyler 02:15

I very specifically separated the debts. It was really tempting for me because it's hard to add another design to it. And I was like I'm not. I just can't ask another basket man to wear my face. I already get weird enough about sports jerseys and stuff like, Alright, I've been there, but like, definitely get the logo, there's some stuff that's not our logo. So there's good shit for fitness, we have a cool shirt, so make sure you check it out, I'd say three of my favorite overall logos sit on that overall designs have ever put together sit on there. So they're not necessarily related to the podcast. It's just like gym shit, cool. Shit, it's a place to be. So, John, acquisition metrics we want to run with here right away. Let's start from the top, I suppose.



John Fairbanks 03:01

Yeah. And this originally comes from where we will say the phrase, you got to have a fucking plan. And you have to have a fucking plan. And a lot of times that can be vague. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted us to drill in and look at hard quantitative numbers that we can look at. And there's a larger strategy that we do with our gear, cat gear Academy members. And there's a larger strategy that we'll talk about in future episodes on the podcast as well, that can all of this stuff folds in. And there's several phases to what you talked about in the beginning, which was the client journey. And so this is drilling in very, very specifically at the acquisition phase of trying to generate leads and be able to push traffic to whatever it is that you're trying to do in your gym. So this is going to be whether you're trying to generate leads for personal training, whether you have a nutrition program, you have a bootcamp program, you have, you know, you work with just student athletes, and you have a camp that's coming up for the next break that they're going to have, whatever it is, whatever product is



Tyler 04:03

nutrition, cut, whatever that is whatever the entry point is



John Fairbanks 04:07

product or service, right. And those are two different things. And we can hash that out later. But it's ideas, any product, any service that you sell, should have kind of these four metrics need to be leading everything that you do, otherwise, you don't have a fucking plan. And that's where we have to get drill into that specifics. First one. So the first one is going to be specifically about content, how much content are you creating? Now we have evolved with this because the goalposts get moved all the time when it comes to social media specifically, and honestly it gets moved whether we're talking about posting on like your Google business profile, whether you are posting which platform you're posting on, what platforms are relevant. The problem is that if you're still taking advice from 2018 2019, that kind of time period as far as what you should be following when it On social media was Tiktok even a thing, then? That's a problem. And so it has to evolve over time.



Tyler 05:08

And should you be using Tiktok? Robin? I wouldn't say no, I wouldn't say Yes, I certainly wouldn't bother. But just know that I would say it's low value, it's high traffic, low value. So again, remember, when it comes to this, we're talking about content you're creating for directing traffic to your brick and mortar location. And it does not mean creating content to be a content creator, that's a very different thing. Don't convolute those two things at all.



John Fairbanks 05:36

And understand because we really dive into this when we're working with folks on talking about, like, paid advertising versus your organic or effort based marketing. But the idea is that there are ads that are specifically just to raise awareness that you exist, but then there is very specific content that you want to be creating for specific things. And so that is where when we're talking about it's how much content are you creating and putting out there? And this is across multiple mediums as well. So are you talking about this via? Do you have a blog? Do you have emails that you're sending out? Are you doing this through social media? Are you doing this in the gym, right? This is how much content? Or how much are you talking about the particular thing that you want to sell.



Tyler 06:23

So a great example, a thing we hear very often, is that we have some gyms that sell a shitload of personal training and very few groups, we have some gyms that sell mostly groups and can't sell personal training for the life of them unless they just get lucky, right? And so it's really, really important to know, when we start looking through some of these accounts, John and I have gone through over 500 plus our audit stuff, looking at 520. So accounts in the last month and a half. So as we go through these, like the biggest one, the biggest question we ask is, well, what are you struggling to sell? What do you what programs are you trying to grow, and very often, the ones that are underperforming are the ones you're not fucking talking about. You're just not talking about enough. And that doesn't mean that it all has to be Instagram, it should be some of it, right? It should also be on Facebook, Johnson multiple mediums is super important. Whatever tools you have to grow this thing you should be using, right. So if we're talking organic, it's going to be Instagram, it's going to be Facebook, it's going to be your personal Facebook page, it's going to be your coach's personal Facebook page, it's going to be anyone else who can get involved to start to put this stuff out there, you need the hustle, your staff needs to hustle. You need to have it be visually easy to see early on in their feed as someone goes through it. We scroll through so many gyms, it's a struggle and sell personal training. And there's not the word personal trainer. They're just pictures of people exercising and some other stuff. So know that at some point, you need to speak to these people, and you need to catch them early on. They say it's like, what is it John, it's like seven seconds, 10 seconds, you get to actually let people understand that you can help them. And it's not about your competence. It's not about that at all. It's just simply does this thing fit the thing that I need? If a person is looking for personal training, somewhere there, I'd better say personal training, because then you'll get them around for a little bit. Otherwise, they're going to look for personal training, see a bunch of group classes, and God knows what else was posted, and they're gonna move on to somewhere else. And then you're gonna wonder why all the leads that you get, as you bring up personal training as a possible upsell or as a possible option, or like,



John Fairbanks 08:30

in a previous life of mine, when I focused really heavily on design. And we talked about specifically when it came to like web page design, and the science behind that there was a big thing that we used to focus a lot on because it was Stanford released a study years and years ago that talked about how quickly someone makes a decision of whether or not they're going to stay or leave a webpage. Right? And it's under, it's something crazy, it's under three seconds. So as soon as someone lands there, they are going to make a decision of are they staying? Or are they scrolling and staying? Are they staying? Or are they leaving and they're gonna move on to the next thing, I would be willing to guarantee that if you redo that study now, because of the effect that YouTube shorts, because of the effect that Tiktok has have people's ability to be consuming massive amounts of content really, really fast. And just immediately swiping left swipe right mentality is hyper, you know, stimuli stimulated. So you have to make it easy for someone to be able to understand. And the problem is for you to be able to play with the algorithm now. And this is where those goalposts move it is before you could get away with saying, you know, people that are trying to be able to be influencers, they're gonna post and they're gonna post a bunch of times a day and then do X, Y and Z. And you could get away with being like yeah, you know, just be consistent and post once a day like that. That would be like a big ask once every other day you'll be alright. And the reality is, is that it's very, very clear that again, as of this recording in April of 2023, the goalposts have moved, and it really is more,



Tyler 10:14

a little bit, because I think this is important, right? What it does was it gives you an opportunity, you don't have to post a bunch more, you don't have to 10x your what's the word, your your effort, you don't have to make 10 times as many videos as you used to make, right, that's, you don't have to 10x the overall like time put in, you just now get the opportunity to talk about more, I think a couple years ago, if you were posting four to five times a day, on your grid on your feet, that would be a lot. And people are like, overwhelming. And I just think that the trend is adjusted. And now there's some standards with the algorithm right now that have kind of been made public is that, yeah, once a day is like the minimum, but there's kind of a sweet spot between like three and five, two and four, somewhere in there like it, but it's got to pretty much be every day, not the sky's not gonna fall. But if you're doing every third day before, because you were just kind of, you know, did that and posted some stories, right, because a few years ago, stories were really going to be prioritized. And so it always got to those views. Well, that's kind of been locked back in favor of things like reels and shit like that. But now that's also been walked back. Usually, if you make a real, they just pump you full of fucking view as well. But that exceeds your local reach and kind of is not that relevant to you, truthfully. So making like video content and really having to go from being a gym owner or coach to understanding this, like, in depth on camera, shit, that goes into creating really, really engaging, like John said, You gotta catch them in two seconds or less three seconds or less stuff. That sucks. And it sucks to have to learn that and to have to do that four or five times a day. That's a lot. But you do have as a business, multiple services and multiple offerings and multiple types of clients with which you can reach, which allows you to then now take this moment in which the algorithm is favoring more more content, to just speak to each one of those things more specifically, to start with that it should you don't have to be great at everything just don't suck. But no, like, we do personal training. We do know that we work with high school athletes, you can. Here's a testimonial. This is a before and after picture, hey, here's where we're located. If you're within this time, from here, this great, hey, we have this special offer coming up. Hey, look into the train before work. professionals want to get the word, we know you're busy, just like each one of these things is now an opportunity to see if you'd have to check that box. I think people thought that doing just maybe one post every week or a couple posts a week was going to be like, Oh, good, I don't have to put that much work into social media. Right, I can walk it back. But then what they did was they talked about fucking nothing. Once a week, it was just like raising your hand and going, we're here. Here's our logo on a picture of someone exercising, and it doesn't do fuck on it doesn't move the needle. This forces you to operate your social media with a level of specificity that actually will help you. And you don't have to make it complicated. Each one of these things I've described to you can go back to our social media strategy guide on content creation, and just get in there and start batching these content professionals. How do I want to attract professionals to perfect my kids program? How do I do it? Can I put youth training program in big letters so that when someone finds my business on Instagram, on Facebook, whatever that is kind of front and center that that's the piece that'll connect to them as they scroll, because you're gonna scroll for 3040 seconds you're gonna bail if you don't see anything that you like, if I scroll through if I'm looking for a gym to train out and it's nothing but like Jazzercise shit 2030 seconds I'm out it's not I'm not saying this sucks. I'm just saying I'm not gonna go there. So I'm gonna move on. But if I scroll through that jet that page and right there it's like, you know, we got like a meathead beef house bodybuilding section in the back and it's awesome and it's hard to like, Okay, I'm It caught me, right.



John Fairbanks 14:09

And you've touched on this a bunch Tyler but it's important to make sure you you notice that it's depending on you have, understand the advice that we're giving you we're not talking to you if you are someone that's trying to build a online business here, right, we're trying to play that online fitness pro thing. There's lots of blood in the water. You go find somebody who is really good at that. What we're talking about is specifically those of you with brick and mortar and there's a big piece here that's super important that you understand. If you are a younger gym owner and you are living and dying on Instagram because that is where you're from. You are killing yourself by missing out on one of the big benefits that Facebook brings. So Facebook and cross posting over to Facebook and leveraging that platform allows people to see that their friends were tagged, or that there was a post that is specific to your geographical area. So that geographic connection for us to be able to see, oh, there's a gym, I didn't know that Tim goes to that gym, because that's what ends up happening is that somebody does tag you is participating, you are participating. So it allows that push of a local algorithm to then capture people that are in the vicinity of your spot. But this number one thing of how much content you're creating, and what specifically you're creating it for. So for those particular classes, or programs or services or products, it's the number one thing that we can immediately capture when we do sit down with someone on an Instagram audit that we do, or we audit with gym owners every single week that you can sign up for in the description in our bio. But it's the first thing that we're able to capture being like, Oh, well, you're just not talking about it. And just like you said, Tyler's everyone started doing less or just a bare minimum. And, and having gone through over 500 accounts, the only photo that apparently anyone can manage to get is a group photo, or of someone snatching



Tyler 16:11

action photos or a boring crowd of people you don't know from too far away to recognize anyone. So that's rough.



John Fairbanks 16:18

The second metric that we immediately go, so build all of these build off of each other. So we go from how much content are you creating? You got to know that it's a real number? That's not like a nebulous thing, if you want to sell nutrition, how much have you been badly talking about your new nutrition program? This past week, literally, how many times how many emails how many posts,



Tyler 16:37

and this should exist somewhere, right twice this week on the feed, also on Facebook, and also on my personal and then also, every single day, this week, the four to eight, four to six things that we can put together for your story. Maybe that's it, maybe you get one out there each day. And so going back and checking that is going to be the key to knowing Well, geez, okay, I did this. Now, this is what I did this week. And know that one week does not mean anything, but get a little bit out. But you need to be consistent. Like all things. You had a client that came in and wanted to lose weight. And they said, Well, I did one workout in my fit. Yeah, it's like, you fucking idiot. And that's the worst thing I get is you guys will come to us and go, Well, I can. So I did this for three days, and I haven't gotten elites. Well, Christ, you've been pretending like you're not in business for the last however many years like, Okay, well, let's get to it. And so one of the things is at the end of each week, you go back. And so this is where this is where my time resources went, my energy resources went into creating and publishing this, these places. Each one of those traces to a program, program, something a product. So now, when you got your leads, what were they interested in? In the beginning? What inquiry were they responding to? And that's important to know, what are you looking to accomplish? You know, what, what got your attention? What are you looking to accomplish, I like the thing about nutrition or whatever. So you should know at the end of each week, how many of those leads that you got and what those people were interested in. And after a month, two months, three months, you should be able to really go, you should be able to manipulate your inputs, and adjust what these outputs that you're getting are. And I think that that. The other one is, you need to cover all your bases. The second secondary piece, which is a theme that is maybe going to be harder to track is going to just be kind of demographics, but that's going to come with you just being plugged in, in general, right. So what I like about the way that we can tell this from a product standpoint is this just go figuratively, though we got gyms we work with that have 24 hours 24 hour facility, they also have personal training notes about group fitness. And they also have semi private, custom groups. And they also have nutrition coaching, right? Yep. Remote nutrition coaching. And so if someone comes in after we get into the goals, discussion, right? The first thing on the offer stacks that we run with our gear Academy, people that run through the iPad, and everything is a question. It's like, Well, where do you want to start? And it may sit right there with personal debt, the answer to that question, personal training or just 24 hours. So that's gonna be the best indicator, like where do they start? That's the best indicator of what they can't, what their expectations were when they came in. Okay? So if we're trying to sell personal training, but every single lead that we get that's coming in, is going when we ask where do you want to start and they pick the tab that says 24 hour membership only, or 20 for our membership, or for our access? Well, we're missing something. Right now with those people. Those people are getting exactly what they want. They're not. It's not misaligned. Right. You want someone else who's interested in personal training to obviously ignore your shit. Or they're not finding it, they're not connecting to it. So somewhere in there, you're missing so you need to know what I can adjust to start attracting these because even when you bring up personal training, conversational, you can see there's a disconnect there. And I don't like coercive sales. I don't like pulling people up or pulling people along, we want them to move forward and feel like they're empowered, but they have a choice, that they are able to choose their own buying habits and their next path all themselves should feel very customized and very much about them. Not me going Well geez, I mean, you're gonna have to do personal training or else like, that's shitty. Right? That's like shitty, like consequence based sales, and I fucking hate it. So that's the thing that we really need to focus on is tracking where these leads come, what these leads are coming in for, what are their intentions, were their expectations when they come in? Because then you're gonna know really how valuable that content was.



John Fairbanks 20:36

Yeah. Yeah, and if it moves the needle on what you're because again, it's, you're gonna get leads, because hopefully, right, your website can just naturally generate leads, you've been doing the right things when it comes to your Google business profile. So you're getting proper amounts of reviews that are getting plugged in there, which makes you score higher when someone's searching for you on Google, and they're local to your area, like, there's all those things are being done, you should be generating organic leads naturally, by having all of those things in place. So you're just gonna get great, oh, it's a 24 hour facility, I'm interested, I'm gonna go talk to him because I want 24 hours. But if you are saying that you want to be actively getting personal training clients, or clients that are very specific for a specialty program, and you've now made an actual effort in putting that content out into the world, you should start to see leads that come in. So it's really important it's not by accident, because the lead quality and then the types of leads, we're doing a lot of work right now within an MMA gym that's inside of the gear Academy. And very specifically, we identified right a demographic issue, we identified that there was not enough females in classes,



Tyler 21:44

which is always an uphill battle for combat sports, truthfully, if your gym is a powerlifting gym, or a strength gym. Like if you have a reputation for being dude centric. And you and you don't want it to continue to be that way. Or at least you want to feel welcome to the females who you think would be a good fit? Does any of your marketing reflect that. And by the way, we're only staying in the world right now, conversationally free, like organic marketing, where you're just kind of spending time. But know that when the time comes to start spending money on running ads, and running, and spending money on marketing, whether it's traditional marketing or online marketing, just know that the same rules still apply, probably even more. So it's probably more important, because at least you can spend 10 minutes of your time making something and putting it out there and having it swing a mess. There's nothing worse than spending $1,000 to put something out there and have a suck. So know that you need to be playing this game on your organic marketing side, before you start piling a bunch of cash into running ads and paid marketing that then falls flat on his face too. But with this MMA gym, that was one of the things so we also knew that like our product is equally valuable to men as it was to women. Absolutely. For grappling jiu jitsu, the self defense striking fitness aspect of it, it's equally valuable. And I don't actually see a lot of difference in the grand scheme of things like women who would be interested in I think the ratio is nearly the same. There's plenty of guys out there who bring up gender joining and Mm hmm. No, no, no, no, I'm not doing jujitsu. I think that ratio is nearly the same for women. So what it was is we just simply need to make sure that when people look that it doesn't feel like it's the opposite of welcoming, right? And so that's what we did, we just when we would make photos when we were using stock images of some of our branded stuff, some of our many different types things about our specific program, Jujitsu, striking MMA, the overall gym, the overall vibe, just some regular overlay with the the name of the business on it, whatever else we're whatever it is, we're trying to say that we will just make sure we're selecting stock images that half of them are women. That's it. And it's like you don't need to be pandering about it. But if we went about it, just if we only had you know, this is a new new business, so you only have a handful of members. And they're all dudes and you just only take pictures of your own people and put them on there you're just gonna you're gonna stay right where he is. He's not gonna go into that room full of sweaty dudes that sucks. But with a little emphasis and it's only been I mean a couple of months two and a half months of that emphasis you know, we you go from a couple of total females in your adult segment uses different but always plenty of females in our in our youth programs, but a couple of females in your adult programs to 1015 like, Oh, like that. Why? Because we fucking tried. Like that's, that's the thing I just don't understand, it's a thing I see people missing a lot. It's like having a hard time selling personal training as well. It sounds like you're thinking real hard about it. But I don't see anything. Any effort in any way. I don't see any output that you're putting out there that makes me think that you're actually giving a shit about this program at all.



John Fairbanks 24:55

And we know that it's because of the effort that went in and the purposeful effort that went in to be able to attract females for why that's why you five exit, and 90 days of the amount of female demographic that's now at the gym? Not because we're fucking asking people Oh, did you? Did you see the girly photos that we were putting out lately? It just No, it was fucking A plus B equals see then. So that's where it participates. And so that's where you start to say. So that's the next metric that you need to be tracking is did the lead Did you generate leads that came from that content. So for the MMA gym and for the folks that we're working with, it's yeah, you do, because it's on purpose, and we're fucking doing it. From there. The next very, very important piece and the next metric you have to be following. And understand a lot of this stuff is going to be it's always looking back into the past. And this is a larger principle that mean you can fucking live your entire life by. And there's lots of books and shit that's written about it. But the idea is like the key to success lies in the past. So the idea is you have to be going back and taking a look at where you were not ideally, what you were hoping or what you hoped was going to happen. It just was. Where were you? Where are you now? And how do you adjust and act accordingly moving forward? So all of these principles, all these metrics, you can not start doing better, until you fucking start doing it. And this is super hard and complex for people to get get the fuck out of your own way. You cannot start playing this game at all if you don't start because starting is only the fucking beginning because we have to get a week from starting so that we can look back and say I will fuck am I did was I doing? Are we doing well? And honestly, your first week, you don't know? Because you haven't fucking done it. So that's why we do get those messages Tyler, where we say guys, alright, this is what you got to do. You got to do this, this and this.



Tyler 26:51

I made a post about my new program and I didn't get anybody to come about it. No, I got no leads from it. I was like one. Yeah. Jesus Christ. What are we talking about? It's the dumbest. Like that's it's always tie these things back to, to coaching fitness clients, because you guys are gym owners, you should know this thing. Again, a guy comes into your gym. I ate a salad today. And I worked out once. Why am I not jacked? You would laugh that guy out of your gym. I mean, maybe maybe you'd be more compassionate. But I have no patience for that type of stupidity coming from a gym owner, who knows that concept and how it applies to everything. But consistency, over a long enough duration of time is how you get results. Okay, in fitness and in business, okay, you can't just pop up and suck, it's not going to work. And you can't pop up and be good for two days and wonder why you're not stacking paper just is not how it works.



John Fairbanks 27:46

And this is really important. Because the first two, this is going to get you to potentially get lulled to sleep into thinking you're more awesome than you are. Because if you started at zero, and you now started to create something, maybe you shoot us a DM and ask us to show you exactly how we batch content and massive amounts to be able to do it. So you can have a month's worth of content and in a few hours, right, you finally learn how to do that. And now you have a bunch of fucking content to be able to throw out into the world. And you know what you actually start getting people coming in or are starting to like and engage and comment or DM you most importantly, and you are starting to get leads when you've done these two things, you can feel really good and you might sit back on your laurels. And for me this is where you can't trip over your dick yet, you have these first two things done, the next thing is super important, which is turning the leads or people generating or showing interest into actual sales opportunities. You can not and this is going to be whether you are again or are using that effort based organic version of marketing or paid marketing, you cannot have leads come in. And then you just be like, Man, we're doing great. We've done so well, we've had a lot of fun, we've had a bunch of interest in our shit and then you don't actually sign anybody up for a call or you message them or start to be able to begin the process of engaging like a human being.



Tyler 29:12

And so not only that, you have to track that. It's very easy to feel especially if you're kind of a DIY solopreneur or at least you have maybe a couple people coaching or if you're juggling a lot of these yourself, if you're early on in your business or late and it's just been slow. You need to understand that you can't just feel the influx of that. And then sometimes close some that's not a sign of this works and that data needs to exist it needs to be written down it needs to be put put somewhere meaning you need to know at the end of each week I had 20 people inquire about this three about this five about this 10 About this wherever that ratio is is what it is, but how many are close. And that's the biggest thing about this is what that tells you is lead quality right And if you're trying to sell $100 Program, or 1000, you're trying to sell $1,000 program, but your tone is $200 people, you may get 20 leads and close one. Know that you can't have a $100 tone for a $1,000 product. It's a waste of your time you'll get a bunch of leads and if you get stoked on leads are stoked about DMS, DMS Oh pay your fucking bills is the thing we Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. This is like marketing 101 it but we learned this a lot very early on in mass genomics. When we ran just a few like testing running some ads way, way, way early on, we only had a couple of products show like this. And we're running out we're trying to do some paid ads, to see how it works. And instead of running ads to the products and we get back Facebook's telling us we got great reach



John Fairbanks 30:50

if you can reach Ty



Tyler 30:52

have never my fucking car is not paid by my car doesn't run on reach. You know what I mean? I don't build muscle from eat and reach my mortgage my bills don't they don't accept reach. So reach impressions. Those are numbers that while they're a part of the process, don't get caught up in them. Same thing with views, reels views, non does not fucking matter views. Don't pay your bills, unless you're an influencer, you're a brick and mortar gym. So super important to know that like, the metric that matters is what you're closing. And so know that if you have a high a ton of leads, and you're not closing any, there can be many factors but we can start to zoom in either right before or right after that step that transition and figure out because something is fucked. And that's that's all that matters then as you go okay. Is it the expectation? Is it the tone? Is it something we're missing in the process of bringing them in very well? Could it be? Is it my sales process? Is it my salesperson? Isn't my sales team? Is it the lead nurturing process where they're just kind of getting juggled around or they come in and now they're they're soured to the whole situation is, but those are now you get to zoom in. And that's where you fix that segment of your business to the benefit of your profitability in the long run. Instead of just going down the road got some internet attention today. Fucking cool. Nobody gives a shit.



John Fairbanks 32:11

And and it is just knowing the numbers, I can't tell you how many times we have been able to sniff out and totally different scenarios within gym owners, businesses that we've worked with, where just because we knew the numbers we were working with, you've been able to snuff out where he's like, Oh, your sales guys fucking up, just because you knew what the numbers were. And it wasn't even numbers of not closing. It was a successful sale. But what were the prices of those sales?



Tyler 32:41

Let me give a good example. Actually, because this is a good example. All right, we have a tax that allows people to spend anywhere from a baseball, we'll call that x, up to what I would describe as what are we talking x times 20x times 15, give or take 10 15x times 10 at the top? Well, this guy was closing to probably 70% of his sales meetings, 6060 70% of his sales meetings, which is a big market. So there's a lot there's, you know, high volume generally. But I mean, I think it was 100% of them. Were price ax bottom. And that fucking first off for as the guy that we've crafted and tested this sale system, and this these offers in multiple industries and seen it very, very, very successful. And I see when sales people think that they're relieving pressure from themselves in the business and the client by just encouraging the base, right? If you're a 24 hour gym person and your 24 hour gym business and you're just like, shuffle everybody to your $60 a month membership like, yes, yes, that's an easy sale. It's easy, I didn't have to offer you anything that mattered. I didn't have to connect to you, I didn't have to give you an opportunity to spend more money. They make it very easy on themselves very likely, if they're not incentivized well enough. Or if they're just fucking lazy. Some salespeople, or coaches if you haven't coaches, so just don't give a fuck to do that part of the job, they're just going to close and move on and save themselves time. But we sniffed it out almost immediately. And the problem was exactly this guy was trying to close everything over the phone, like just didn't want to schedule meetings, just try to close them all over the phone, just get verbal commitments and have them come in for the first thing and it's just closing them into the base thing. Never once presented one of these clients with an option to spend more money. So we go back and we're just like, Jesus, there's like 40 Fucking sales over the course of these last many months. And by the way, the crazy thing is, that your average ticket price number should average out to somewhere between like three and 5x. What your basis if you do this, right, yep, so three and 5x times 40 Fucking sales. This motherfucker castrated 75% of the upside of all of your efforts to go into marketing This is why I tried to stay out of personnel things because I was just like, I don't know, seems like he's just fucking fire him. No, dude, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, we train them, we talk to them, and it just makes it easy on him. So this is what I simply stayed out of it said, Okay, well, I guess we need to make sure he's going through this. Let's address the process. And there's a personnel issue, not just a process issue. But that is a prime example that if you're not tracking what you don't know, you want to have an idea. And if you're not comparing or assuming that it can be better, or should be better than that, how much would that suck? If your business is now leaving 75% of its money on the table? Upside from your sales? Just walk every sale? You're going through on average? Is it selling at 25%? What could it do, dude? Holy shit. Yeah. Imagine right now, if you're not running like a full offer stack. If your sales were for ext, that'd be awesome. You would hate your current status quo. That's for sure. So this is but this is how you fix that if you have to be tracking this. Not only that, we like to track that for each product as well. And in general, but like, these are metrics that I still, again, just how many did you close? That's the first part that they showed up for the meeting. What did they buy, right? And again, you'll know if everyone's coming in, and everyone is picking your cheapest product on your cheapest first tier, you'll know that the expectations would be where that comes into. We refer to that as lead quality, right? That's the so we describe as again, you're attracting $10 people and trying to talk to them about $1,000 product, that's going to be an issue and you'll get a lot of people, but if they're coming in, and the goal is to sell them $1,000 product, you're gonna eat your hat, it's gonna be bad for your reputation, they're not going to be super stoked about the process, because then it feels like a bait and switch. And it starts to feel like the shit that the other big fitness consultant juggernauts are trying to push your gym to do out there. And we ain't about that. So that's how you know these expectations got to be like onpoint dialed in and aligned with what you're trying to do from beginning to end. And you won't know if you're not tracking any of these metrics.



John Fairbanks 37:08

Yet, the same principle allowed us to be able to immediately identify where we saw, we had the metrics for the leads that were coming in, that the gym owner was saying the right things, was putting out content, was generating leads, was getting leads scheduled, and people weren't showing up. That was another one. Like, there's something broken? Well, and a lot of times for you guys, as gym owners, you're too close to the trees to see the forest. Right, it's right here. The problem is right here and you can't see it because you can't back up because you're just trying to get motherfuckers to show up while you're also coaching. And you just had to go do a toilet paper run and bring make sure your fucking was sat and then you just do your one of your coaches is having a baby. So now you have to pick up those classes. Like you're doing all those things. And so the benefit was immediately we were able to see the numbers and we said, this is broken, you have something broken? Are you the one sending out the messages? I will not like one of our client management systems, you know, the software that we pay for that, that you all probably pay for every single month to be able to manage that shit. It's normal that it handles it well. We'll go no, it doesn't not. It's doing something wrong. Something's broken in it because these numbers don't make sense. And sure as shit you go in, dive in, look at it for a half a second. And they're like, yeah, no, it's totally fucked.



Tyler 38:29

We were looking at and what were we talking like? 30 To 40 Completely tabled leads essentially just dead



John Fairbanks 38:35

buying leads even. And worse. Yeah, it wasn't even though they were dying. Like you said they got they were drowning in garbage,



Tyler 38:41

you're better off ignoring them, in my opinion, and saying oops, than doing what some of these automations were doing, which is automations were a text, a text, an email or something. That's I mean, moments and moments, and I'm all about being thorough and being quick, but just oversaturated constantly constantly and disingenuous shit coming from multiple different angles, like, Hey, here's our little hotline, give us a call who is and it's like, Hey, if you want to talk to me about this, it's like Jesus Christ. Just fucking schedule the goddamn appointment, get to schedule reminder, reminder, if they don't follow up to that, like just be practical with these automations. And it was not. It was trying to be very 2014 to 2017 Hyper thorough pointlessly conversational and I don't think the multiple avenues of correspondence across multiple platforms were very integrated. So a person would sign up to become interested in this gym and they would just get smashed with I mean, eight to eight to 30 points of contact in the first couple of days that none of them made any fucking sense. Right? And so you just whoa, I'm out. I'm proud. That's it. That's what happened just tanked by the way. And now if you're paying money like they were in that situation, paying money for those leads, running ads paid Mark in generating that traffic, you didn't just lose those leads, you lost the money you spent to get those leads. And that's a huge fucking problem. But again, run into this problem once, solve it once, move on, right problem solved, the worst thing you can do is kind of have this problem, not amplify your leads, enough to the point where you ever notice, and then your shits just gonna suck forever, and it's gonna suck at like, a low level of production for you, and it's gonna suck, that's the worst, that's gonna suck, at least you better make it better happen at a high enough frequency, so you can figure it out and fix it.



John Fairbanks 40:37

Absolutely. And so again, the only way to check it is to be able to know what those numbers are. And then feel confident what you're supposed to do is, hey, this is fucked up, I don't know what to do. And then being able to do it quickly, because that was really what we did is we got brought in, identified it quickly, triaged that even faster, and then were able to move on. And now that gym owner is back on the right track. So comes from those four metric areas. And then there's the one last thing that has to happen once you have these. So it's how much content are you putting out? Right? How many leads is that generating? How many sales opportunities are getting scheduled for you from those people that reach out to those leads? And then off of those scheduled appointments? How many have you closed? Those are your four metrics while we're talking about this acquisition or phase?



Tyler 41:22

Now, there's a second phase that we get into the kind of level two of this I don't even folds into retention? Definitely. Then we're just going to touch on here briefly. And we'll have to probably do a whole episode on this. But not only is it a matter of what they bought? Or did they buy it, right? How much did they spend? Yeah, that piece that matters very much. So how much did they spend? What is the average ticket price, break that down into the average ticket price for each of those programs as well, because if you're giving people choices, that matters, right, and then the next piece of that is in each of those products, or you can go generally or specifically, what's the average duration of the time that those people from those leads are staying with you got to keep this you got to run with this data for a while. But you know that if these people are coming in one month and done well, shit, that's a lot of resources coming in and selling somebody for whatever this fixed dollar amount is, and then you don't get them back. Okay, if they're staying for a year, and that's a $500 a month product, we're great. At six, that's if that's the app, that means on average, you're getting six grand out of each one of those leads. And you need to know that for a couple of reasons. The reason you know how long they stay and how much money they spend is one, because it matters, just it really, really, really does matter. The second reason, though, is that there's a quality control aspect of this that you can't miss, so you can't avoid it. And this is the thing that I see so many fitness consultants fuck up, or they just go ads first, or they just go leads is in the end, we still need to know and track how long they are staying in the business, not just so we know what the actual value of this is. So we can increase our spending, right? Because we know if I spend my if my average price to acquire a lead, that convert is $150. So let's say $100. And I see if a number and my average sale is for $200 a month and they stay for a year well, great, it's 2400. Well, that's perfect, I can spend a lot of money on getting new leads through the system because it's profitable. But if it's less than that they're not sticking around for very long. The other side of that coin is I need to know if the shit that's going on in my gym sucks. And that like average clients, the lifetime client value or average duration of their first contract, or whatever that is, whatever metric, whatever you want to call that data. Yeah, that matters beyond just budgeting for your marketing. It matters because it needs people will know if your gym is worth a fuck. And you're always going to lose people to life, you're going to lose people, someone gets married and moves away, someone goes to college, someone gets a better job. So some of that churn, you can't beat, you can't fight. But that still doesn't matter because those are ones that are not the fault of your quality control. But it still is reflective of your financial ability to be marketing, right? If you notice, still, that a lot of people leaving for life are just dumping off in six to 10 months because it's just how this works, then, well, no, you can't spend $2,500 to acquire that client. Not at that price point, it's just not gonna work. So getting that data kind of in the tail end here is also allows you to then make sure that things are going out on the floor or working and then as you are starting to run the system more often, you can really start to punch this dollars in dollars out instead of constantly trying to play this organic game, this organic marketing game where you're just running an open and you don't really get to manipulate the dials as much as you'd like of demographics of budgets, all those things. Once you have a full clear picture of what the client's journey Knee is from the thing they see, to the time they get, they respond to it to the time they schedule an appointment to the time they close to the time they spend in the gym, and all the money they spend during that time. That lifetime value, then you can just buy with marketing dollars, like a fucking regular business. And so many fitness businesses do either too much of that, or fucking none of it. And it's a huge problem. And if you're staying on the side, and none of it just knows, like, once you get this data in place, God, you can just tear it up. Because you can just know, I'm gonna spend two grand this month, three grand this month, and I'm gonna yank out, I'll be able to increase my product's profitability over the course of the next year by another 2030 grand. And I'm gonna do that every month, I can do that forever and keep adding layers and layers. Yes, that's a beautiful thing. But if you're not playing that game, you're never going to score any fucking points.



John Fairbanks 45:52

And it definitely is. So you call that a couple of different things, which is you have natural attrition that is going to happen. And we definitely are going to go deep on this, as many of these like four key metrics pay attention to on the acquisition side, there is a group, primarily, there's three core ones, and they all come back to that lifetime value metrics that come back to retention. And at the idea of like, because of natural attrition, you have to be participating in the acquisition game, constantly, you have to. And that's also goes back to and it probably be another episode where we talked about things like, what are you doing for marketing? Like when it comes to marketing? How is this viewed in your business right now or like marketing and advertising, but you're just playing the organic game to be able to offset natural attrition?



Tyler 46:42

Yep. Usually, if you can make net gains in numbers from your organic strategy, that's great. We recommend that people are capable of doing that. Right? For sure. Because then comes hell or high water. Jesus, you can at least kind of keep the boat



John Fairbanks 46:57

afloat. Right? But you've mentioned this a lot, Tyler and this is exactly right. Where it's attrition is super attrition acquisition is super important. Getting new leads, getting new members, right, it's the name of the game. It's what everybody does, like mental masturbation online when you look at ads, I mean, we don't, we don't believe us, like searching for how to get more leads for my gym? Go google that and just make the mistake of clicking on any link on Google and watch your social media feed, get fucking inundated with ads that are gonna follow you to the ends of the earth, trying to convince you that they're gonna get you 30 leads in the next 30 days, right. So that's where everyone lives. Here's, but here's the truth. Every single client that you have is what biometrics will be seen by Tyler, anywhere from two to three times more valuable. Once you have them. For sure, you'll easily make double the money on the person that you have. If your retention game is as strong or stronger than your lead acquisition game. If you



Tyler 48:05

can double your average client contract contract, like the length of time with which your average client does business with you, if that number is low, and you just when you start counting for this data numbers low. If you can find a way to double it, doubling it is good. It's just no small task, right? Especially if you're a larger scale, but that's just for the sake of this that has the same value to your business as getting not just twice as many leads, but twice as many closed sales for new members. Right. So overall, that is of equal importance. Because if I can tell you that not only are the paid ads and all your marketing strategies running, if I could double its efficacy for your business, I could double the amount of people that you get in your gym every month with just as one small, you can do all clickbaity ships, this one small thing will get you twice as much money and you're busy twice as many members when you get twice as many members and people don't leave Don't people leave and stick around for twice as long. That's it's that that piece of data is the thing that kind of gets slept on a little bit. And this is one of those things beginning to end this whole chain. This is where a lot of that short sighted bait and switch fitness business bullshit blows up in people's faces. Because now you have a very, very, very short lifespan of your clients. They do business with you for not very long. Because they came in expectations were misaligned. They got pulled up the ladder to something too expensive for them that they can't afford. Maybe they want it at the moment but they know they can't sustain it. And then it didn't get options to drop back down or fall into something or even worse, you didn't get to deliver the service or give them the results that they wanted. Because for god knows what reason but then the fact of the matter is your entire system is broken. And it may not just be because you suck at coaching it may be simply what you got them in for didn't work. So all of this stuff retention matters. Your lead numbers matter what therapy even told their expectations matter when they come in the amount of people you close matter with the ticket price sales matters. And a lot of you guys aren't tracking any of this. That's the truth. Now there are many that are many that are. And that's because in the end, I also want to know, in addition to what does it cost you to acquire a new member? Does it? Yep, I've crossed my fingers, and I post on Instagram once a week, fuck off. I don't know what to tell you. It's not it. That's not anything but hoping. And we've gone over how effective that is, in the past. So



John Fairbanks 50:34

the last thing that we have to touch on so once you know these metrics, and we go back, we zoom back into just the acquisition phase that we've been talking about for the last 45 minutes. It's that weekly review. What worked? What didn't? What are we changing? You answer those three questions every single week, specific to whatever the goals are, that you've established. Again, understand, right? Remember, you're still you're still busy, right and understand the poorer you are, the busier you are, like, just understand how that works. So it's as if you continue to stay too busy to do anything. Or you have leveled up your mind and your thinking to where you are now just not busy enough to where you can focus on trying to make some money in your spot, you focused on one or two particular things that you want to move the needle on, and actually give a college try for the next 90 days, you have to systematically be looking back is those four key metrics? What are they every week at minimum? What did we do? What worked? What didn't? How are we going to change it? If you do that, that's the key. And if you look at that, then everything and that until we've talked about this before, it's that concept can be applied to literally everything that you're doing.



Tyler 51:58

I think the thing too, though, John, is that like before we move on, fulfilling your services, doing the operations of your business, whatever it is that it is, whether it's coming in and coaching, whether it's having coaches, meeting all that stuff, that's all important. But know that doing those things or not growing your business, know that. And I just when I see the ratio of effort that gym owners and their teams are putting towards things. I mean, I got a coach, and then I gotta rest and then I got to do this, and then I got to work out and it's like, and then I don't understand why my business isn't growing. So you're not fucking doing anything, dude. So just know, in the end, like this stuff matters more than the other stuff. But know that it's very, very, very difficult to grow a business, when you're not putting any effort into growing a business, you're not going to your clients and aren't going to grow any muscle. If they're not putting a fucking shred of effort in the growing muscle. It's just not going to happen. So keep that in mind that like, all the other things are important, but I want you to know that you do have to look back and go How much am I? Truthfully, not worrying about this? The worst thing? Is this jewelers worrying about growth, worrying about getting new members and they're not doing anything. So keep that in mind. How much work are you actually doing? And if not make some time just make some time to make sure that this stuff starts happening. And you have to build a system you can't do and do this shit. You can't build a new specialty program and cash in and hope that that carries it because that's not going to do anything for you either. Well, we'll get into gear Academy that's science to



John Fairbanks 53:34

One thing just gives me the feeling that we've like other things back to fitness for all of us to be able to. It is the equivalent of someone saying, Man, I'm working out really hard, but I'm not losing any weight. Or I'm not doing things like what are you eating? To not have a nutrition conversation to act like if you're trying to reach those goals you have a client is trying to reach their goals. And he's like, but they come in and they fucking work their ass off and they're in the gym, in their business running the business running it themselves and it's like well fuck I'm still not like I'm What are you eat? Oh, you're fucking you're doing like awful shit. And no wonder you're just spinning your wheels and you're getting yourself exhausted and you're making yourself sick and you're having all these fucking problems. So it's it's, it's very, very similar.



Tyler 54:16

Get off the business operations treadmill and start acquiring some new leads and making some real fucking money getting the gear Academy so laser description for that you can go to gym owners revolution.com as well for more info on that stuff. join the Facebook group. That link is in the description. Follow me on Instagram at Tyler effing stone follow John at Jay banks FL on Instagram and the shows on Instagram at the gym owners podcast. Thanks for listening everybody. See you next week.