The Gym Owners Blog/Podcast/Developing A Profitable Youth Training Camp: A Case Study

Developing A Profitable Youth Training Camp: A Case Study

Friday, April 05, 2024

CUSTOM JAVASCRIPT / HTML

EPISODE KEYWORDS

people, gym, owners, work, sell, talking, kids, camp, opportunities, business, program, tyler, money, email, debrief, run, fulfillment, ticket

OUTLINE

  • A gym's youth training camps and marketing strategies. (0:00)
  • Improving youth sports programs for gyms. (4:03)
  • Fulfillment in business and sales. (8:18)
  • Sales strategies and campaign execution. (14:10)
  • Using Facebook ads for a fitness camp with a successful ROI. (17:44)
  • Marketing strategies for fitness camps. (21:32)
  • Leveraging a youth program to generate leads and grow a fitness business. (26:26)
  • Marketing strategies for fitness businesses. (30:53)
  • Marketing and networking strategies for gym owners. (36:08)
  • Networking and marketing for gym owners. (39:40)
  • ​Marketing and selling high-ticket programs. (44:02)
  • Scaling a fitness business through high-ticket programs. (48:36)

TRANSCRIPT

Tyler 00:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome 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 00:06

It is going swimmingly.



Tyler 00:07

Before we dive into the subject for this week, I want you guys to get into the gym owners revolution Facebook group, that link is going to be in the show notes. In there, we got a community of gym owners, we got some monthly challenges. It's all free. There's not a bunch of bullshit in there. But if you want to get involved, find a little more about what we do here and the types of things that we cover. That's the place you want to work with us directly go to gym owners revolution.com Make sure you follow the show at the gym owners podcast on Instagram. Follow me at Tyler effing stone tablet eff ironstone and John, and you can follow me on Instagram at J banks f L guys, there's a form that we're ripping off for Jocko. But this is essentially like, this is a debrief episode where we're gonna go through with one of the businesses that we work with in our gear Academy. And there's a process that we've gone through. Some of them call it a specialty program or one off piece that we go through and we debrief at the end of this sequence. Every time we run one of these camps, we go through like, Okay, how did it go? How did it sell? What could we do well, what would we have done differently? Where do we fall on our face? What opportunities now, with a little bit of the benefit of a little bit of hindsight? What opportunities do we know for sure that we still have? What tools do we have at our disposal when we try to run this next time? So we're going to take you guys through that thought process using real world stories, numbers and applications, because this has been a pretty successful process for us. So if you guys run a gym, you'd like to win either, whether it's youth programs, one off specialty programs, weekend camps, whatever this is, make sure you're paying attention. So let's dive right into it. One of our gear Academy gyms. I don't want to give a bunch of specific things. I guess we probably shouldn't give specifics. I don't think necessarily as far as who and what and all this stuff. So but primarily their business is youth training off-season and in season training, whether it's agility, strength, explosiveness, power, just athletic training for youth. What do we say an age is probably like, honestly, like, down as low for some of these camps is like eight, nine up to 717 18. So yeah, probably third grade, 12th grade, that's the bread and butter of the business. And they do many other things. And they do them really, really well. But we're talking with this gym owner, because he runs a camp two times a year, so far, it's probably gonna end up being three most likely, and then maybe a big ticket. But this is two or three days, depending on the situation. Three day camp. It's not all day, I think it's just a few hours or a couple hours each day. Price points are pretty reasonable. I think it's around 150 bucks or something like that



John Fairbanks 02:40

for between 100 and 115 to 150. Yeah.



Tyler 02:43

And what we do here, so this program, we just launched it, because it's something he's done, he's done it well. So you market it however you can. Right? So the first time around when you're going to do one of these specialty programs. Okay, I'm going to try and do this thing. And so we did it, it was a camp and lots of people kind of came, right? How was the marketing the very first time around probably a little loose, maybe it was a lot of word of mouth, it was a lot of things that happened that maybe you can't always replicate very well. Right? As far as like shit, how can I guarantee that next time I get twice as many people or 50-50% more people? So that becomes the objective, when we kind of debrief at the end of any one of these programs, or any one of these plays that we try to make is we sit down and go okay, now that we know, what could we have done better? And in this case, very specifically, the first time around, this was just a thing that kind of happened. And now it's like, okay, let's focus on the changes made from things from round one to round two. Now we have a more deliberate timeframe on when we start promoting, right, that was a big difference. Social media content was a little more deliberate, a little more direct, we still weren't running ads by the second time around. That didn't happen until this recent one. But for Christmas, that was something that was simply all organic, all messaging out to your existing email list. And mostly all word of mouth at that point. Correct.



John Fairbanks 04:02

The email was brand new. So what was nice, because when we started working with this gym owner, he'd already done this before. So he'd already kind of done this on his own. Like you said, it's kind of half has not haphazard, that's unfair. It would be essentially, hey, I have this idea. And then just went with it. And the success that he had was kind of just you get lucky, right? You come up with an idea, you run a thing, you do what you think is best. When we get him he's getting hot. When he first comes into the gear Academy. He's preparing to do it a second time, like you said, Tyler, and this is when we introduced we've talked about this on a previous episode of this our reps method. So the idea of where like, when we're getting ready for the second iteration to record the steps this time, instead of just doing it and going and because most of the time whenever any of us are doing this anything for the first time you're really just going like by the seat of your pants, just kind of flying through it and hoping to get through like duct tape and will. And so we're like this time you need to record the steps that you're doing So then we can then be able to evaluate. And that's where you recognized when we did the post mortem part of that, that, that normal part with them, and we do that debrief session, it's why he's not sending out emails ever. And so that's when we prepared for that second iteration being like, hey, send out emails, better yet, collect emails, collect information, collect that data from people that come in, because before it was getting the waiver signed, but it was mainly, please don't sue me if your kid explodes his ACL, like that was all the waiver was it wasn't emails or phone numbers are having the ability to fall back up with those people. So that was another major change between the email and collecting that data from those people that came in? Yeah.



Tyler 05:43

So then we started looking at what are the real opportunities for this for the business? Because one of the biggest things I see with First off youth programs very often is running out of functional fitness gyms, I think that's where the majority of them are all right, you're going to run a youth program, you're gonna have a coach who's going to do classes. So the business space has to be structured for group training, I guess, if that makes sense. And when I see the promotion for those I see very short time windows, right, it starts next week, or maybe in 10 days, I see very limited social media posting, I see almost no testimonials or reaction. And then when we dig further into the businesses themselves, very rarely do we see them even utilizing the email. If so it might be one, one email that goes out, this is a big issue we see when we take a gym through this process through this debriefing process where we go, man, one fucking email, you know, and the program kind of worked. So when we started running through this gym, now that we got, we started seeing some of these opportunities we see. Okay, well, how could we have attracted more people, right want me to believe in hanging on the bone somewhere? Second one is how can we make this truly better for the business because a lot of gyms when they run specialty programs, one off stuff, seasonal camps, they end up being like a nice little hopeful money grab, I got an extra couple 1000 bucks in the bank. And now that's kind of how it is, and they don't understand or at least don't make an effort to make this more beneficial to the business. Or to make this an access point to the business or to try to attract if it's kids, try to get them into more regular training, try to get them into semi private training, try to get them into maybe after this sports season is over working with someone directly. Or even better. Now, you don't have the kids email, when they're nine years old, who's emailed you have the parents. So now you can start to say, hey, you know, we have grown up coaching, love, have the kids in here. If you'd like to work out while you're here, or speak to a coach, while the kids are here doing their stuff, let's make let's get the ball rolling. So these are opportunities that we identify kind of in anything that we're going through. And so this first couple times through this process, we go, Okay, sweet. So when a program is successful, and you've put very little effort into it, it's like man, we can really tighten this up, not only is our effort more effective, but it'll be really a lot more efficient, we'll do a little bit more work, and we'll be able to get twice as many leads, you know, we don't have to just spend spend, spend our way through the stuff and we don't have to do pointless fruitless work, because we're not doing it blindly.



John Fairbanks 08:18

Right. And when you do something for the first time, you really don't have you don't get the ability to tackle all the things that need to be accounted for. So if we stay right in this example, if you're going to run a camp, if this is your first time doing it, and you have not done this type of work before the odds are you need to worry about fulfillment out what are the literal stations I'm going to do with the literal days looking like all the actual fulfillment side of the thing. I



Tyler 08:47

i think it's important because that's a primary concern this first time around is you can end up making a really bad impression on a lot of people. If you don't have that stuff tuned up because your fulfillment isn't just here's what we're going to do. It kind of is, how can we do it? Well, how can we make sure this is a good experience? And also like what's our limit? In regards to people? Right? And attendees, that becomes a big issue. Okay, and maybe we just sell, sell, sell, and we said this in the past, it's like you know, selling is how you eat fulfillment is just the thing you're always doing. So I'm always a proponent of oversell, sell, whatever, pack it in and figure it out. But this first time around, it is important that the fulfillment be good that you don't just sell a product and then go in haphazardly and make it suck because now you're going to have a much more difficult time. The next time around trying to get these people back in and you're fighting an uphill battle when people already know you're not any good.



John Fairbanks 09:43

Yeah, and that's how you got a business. Yeah, right. Because like its fulfillment is where your testimonials come from, like how well you fulfill how people feel how much fun the kids had, how much how much people are talking about the things that you do is from the fifth I'm inside. And this is why we think that gym consultants are all shit their shit because they're prioritizing the wrong fucking things exactly what we talked about in recent episode Tyler, which is, if all anyone is doing is like slapping dicks and having high fives about how much money you've just made, and how much you've sold, with no cost, no conversation around, like the success of the client, like their fulfillment side needs to not be a given correctly, because it's the most important thing that you do. Once that is accounted for, then we can start talking about all the success that we do on the marketing side. But it cannot be that we just think because we can sell well. And now I've paid to have somebody come in and make me better at sales and and now I can browbeat a grandmother into giving up her Social Security check to be able to know personal training or down. Nobody eats out anymore buys Netflix because I've been a personal trainer. Every time



Tyler 11:04

Someone says they can't afford someone, I just ridicule them for their budget budgeting failures and failure to earn money and I put pressure, it's insane. That type of stuff, it's like mother fucker, if you're better at the things that you do better at letting them know how good you aren't that people would want to pay, they would want to dump Netflix for you. And when you gotta convince somebody for that, fuck off already. Fuck this, I just I hate that already. And this is a thing that I see so much. Now in the fitness industry where I've been selling some nutrition products here the last week or so. And when I go through this, people have to be bought in. I cannot just close, close, close, close, close, I need them to actually be invested today. And I need them to be invested tomorrow. You can't for someone to actually be successful, which will then create a cycle of success, a feedback loop of success. They have to buy in every day they gotta buy in, when they go home, they gotta buy in when they're at the grocery store, they got to be fully on board. You can't essentially trick them into spending money with you. Because yes, that's a start that does get them working with you kind of, but reluctantly, and then at what at what cost, because then they're going to work with you and they're not going to have success. They're not really going to be at that point in their lives. And I see this when I work with people. It's a bit of a diversion from the youth program we're talking about. But when I work with people, especially guys like me, when I do nutrition coaching my biggest red flags, the first thing people start talking about when they're or when they're asking about what this nutrition program is, is they basically start telling me all the stuff that they refuse to change. Well, I would like to add a guy. The idea is like, Well, I mean, every night I like to have two, three glasses of wine and maybe a beer or two. And then you know, but for the most part, then I eat tonight and I tend to eat a lot. But like I mostly then I had another guy the other day he was like going through a program. He's like, this person 100 plus pounds overweight. And he goes, Yeah, So how often do I have to eat with this program, though? Because I really only eat one meal a day. And I said okay, well we do get into fasting by about the week three or four we are, this is a process and but you're not going to just come in and tell me well how you're going to fucking do this thing. If you're already dug in going, I don't want to make any changes, then what the fuck are you doing, just just take a knife, start carving all the fat off your fucking body, because that's the only fucking way it's going to go. people into doing business with ranches business, I can send somebody off with a lemon of a car and go ha ha sucks. And if it breaks further down the road, they may not even blame me, it doesn't matter. I can do people in overpaying for this overpaying for that there's lots of places where the person doesn't have to be involved for the purchase or transaction to truly be complete fitness. It's just not the case. So your sales gotta be based on tests, your whole system needs to be based on good experiences, testimonials and results. Because that's what fuels you from execution version number one, to number two to number three, then you have a program that has a real reputation. And then it sells itself and if you don't maximize, don't capitalize on those opportunities. That's the value of revisiting these things every time we execute one.



John Fairbanks 14:10

And that is part of our strategy. That's part of the strategized portion of that reps method. So once we, we have done the evaluation, we do the post mortem and then we start to strategize as we start to look at, right we look at well, on the exact point before we leave what you just were talking about before we leave that idea it's did you have people that had buyer's remorse? Did you have somebody that said yes, and then they backed out? And if so, what was the specific scenario around that? How did the sales process go? Did they do it? Did you oversell right? Did we oversell what it was supposed to be? How far away do they live? Are they 45 minutes plus away? That might limit how much where we're trying to attract people from because an idea sounds good on Tuesday, and then we meet. It led back out. And so were they



Tyler 15:02

under committed in the beginning it was and they say this all All sales are emotional, you gotta close, close, close right away. All inquiries, all leads, it's an emotional decision, it's connected and they execute it. And it goes, I had somebody do the same thing. And I like those conversations when people are telling me like it, man, I look in the mirror and have had enough, and I can't be there, I'm really I'm there. And so Okay, perfect. And we go through the process, and I lay out all the expectations, and then I have somebody buys. And they cancel. Last minute cancellations, like six of our first six appointments. Well, guess what that person wasn't just wasn't ready. It just wasn't, it actually wasn't there. And so that's the nature of this industry is you cannot make somebody ready, you can create a pathway, you can encourage them and guide them along the way. But we don't get to be slimy salespeople, it doesn't fucking work. And that will cost you everything if you try to be.



John Fairbanks 15:55

And so then once this first step is done, the fulfillment has been accounted for now, now you do have something that's well done. This is why oftentimes, too, it's that cover and move approach of this idea where I take care of the most important pieces first. So you run that first version of this campaign, which is this, this gym owner did. So they run the campaign very well. And so then the second iteration, they sell out now adding, prepared to collect content, collect data from people, and then being able to then email those people they sell out within the first week of advertising. And so that was where now for us the focus was we don't have to worry about whether the camp is good. Now it is just how do we market it? What are the specific things that we want to do to be able to raise that level of quality? And then they sell out immediately. So then it was a different conversation. So once he was able to fulfill what he did well, we knew the next iteration of this camp, and we went through that evaluation and then post mortem with him was, do you want to grow? Like, do you want it to be a bigger camp? Because then now you sold 25 spots the first time and then you knew you could max out at 30 with your existing staff? And now we want to go above and what does that look like? Oh, we need to get a new location. So now it needs to be a Locate. So now we're having a larger strategy conversation that then leads to Well, right now you're getting the reach, what are you doing to actually advertise it? Like, like, let's talk specifically on social media right now, you know, you can get 30 like that by emailing your existing people and people that have come from before Perfect. Now we have the ability to do that. Social, what are you guys doing? And that's when we realized there was a lot of opportunity, which was one or two posts with three or four shares. And then that was it. Yeah, like it kind of was one of the things where there was a lot of runway to improve. And



Tyler 17:55

The landscape has changed for Facebook ads quite a bit. One, we've talked about it becoming less and less and less valuable because less and less people are engaging in it. But it still is the one way to really saturate a certain type of people that are in your area. I do think parents still kind of live on that list as well, more so probably than non parents. But when we go through this process, we just like to make fun of gym owners. I still kind of do like oh no run ads, a bunch of boosted posts. But boosting posts for this is for a specific play that is time sensitive. And that is extremely hyper local. If you're just boosting a post. It's like hey, here's my gym, it's fine. You could try tinkering with it. But some of these tools have expanded a lot. We're now used to never really being able to pick demographics. It was very you were very boxed in and now you can really go in and pick what I want within and let's be reasonable. One of the things we talked about with this gym owner was what was the first radius he did so this last iteration did some boosted posts did one it was just one boosted post and blasted out to people I think only spent $25 on it right and closed closed six people at $150 a person closed six so that's what John said about 59 bucks or something like that. We should be more specific as though we truly understand math but it's not hard and that is pretty damn incredible. And when we looked further into it it was again as we're reviewing this in hindsight we go oh shit but you put that radius at like what was like 100 miles or something 100 mile radius like yo so whilst while a lot of the reach that you paid for was blasted out into the ether too far away, right? It still was really fucking successful. Right so now again, with this power of hindsight, we go okay, next time, tighten the Radius up. Don't spend any more just tighten the Radius up, throw and make more content, put something out there, see how that does. And then we can compare A to B. And we can start to see, then once we haven't really refined, we can spend a shitload of money until we've reached a tipping point until we cross the point of diminishing returns, where it's not worth really spending more money, because we don't get more out of it. But as long as you're what was the math on this one, like, what X was that investment?



John Fairbanks 20:19

Oh, so between the $25? So it was $135. Product, he sold six, that kind of $810? Essentially, we need to be specific. Oh, yeah. $810 at $25, for that, it was just a little over 32x 32.



Tyler 20:37

That's fantastic. Yeah,



John Fairbanks 20:39

it's beyond. It's beyond fantastic. Because more importantly, psychologically, he knew that he was going to grow. I did this math after we did that post mortem with Tyler. And it was he who went from his last version of the camp. And he said, You know what, I want to increase how many people I can hold till I sell out by 50%. So he's increased 50%, depending on how many people he wants to take on. And before he is even emailed out, which already has shown over through now three different versions of the cam, he can sell 30 spots by just sending out the email to people that have already been people, he hasn't even sent out the email yet. So between putting up a flier at his location, and now running the ad, we got six he already has,



Tyler 21:28

he is over 15 Out of the 45 already, right.



John Fairbanks 21:31

So you have a massive talk about a mental thing where you originally were at 30, I'm gonna bump it to 45. And now it's, I already have what I normally couldn't have gotten before, through these new means. And he's not done yet. Because this is also the benefit of anyone that comes to you. And this is also why we want to have this conversation and give you guys this insight is that anyone that continues to try and talk to you about running ads and all this, that it costs you $1,000 $2,000 a month to have some fucking dork be able to run your ads for you. And then also, you need to spend $50 a day, or some other fucking ludicrous number to be able to run that ad. funnel down like this is where this is those cottage industries that we've talked about. And we've gone out hard before. And this is the reasons that it's you don't fucking need them, especially in this version of this, that this empowers you, this gives you the power as the gym owner, to be able to say, you're not going to die for $25



Tyler 22:29

No, and for 25 bucks with like you said five miles from where you're at, yep, 10, Maybe nobody's driving that much further for anything, not regularly, especially if it's not recurring. I mean, especially if it's regularly. So at that point, like, you can hit everybody in your area forever, for a few 100 bucks if you just gradually roll it out. So now the other thing that we maybe feel these may have glossed over with this, too, is the pathway from not just this camp being worth, you know, 1000s of dollars just for a couple of days work, right or a couple of days going on in your gym, it's that we want to convert these people into your business. So there's multiple ways that you're those products that can be valuable to you. The first is okay, I got a bunch of people and I made more money, how can I make this more impactful for my business, I could charge more money, I could get more people in. Or I could get more out of these people. Now that doesn't mean taking more money for this product, it means can I get them to do more business with us? Well, you've got them in you. They had a good experience with you. I think that you have a very high likelihood if all these other ducks are in row two, now you reach back out, or we've done special offers for them where like, Hey, you can get a discount. If you start back into one of our group programs, which worked really well that almost we didn't even really address thus far. But from version one to two, that was the case from one to two, it was okay, let's make sure we tighten these loops, let's make sure everybody's getting followed up and getting asked if they want to join the regular semi private stuff, and converted quite a few into some really, really significant business that now is gonna go on these people with their average lifetime client value to the business, it's like really fucking solid. So that was a piece that we always want to make sure that we're addressing that they can, again, this program can be in there. And these people can be more valuable by charging more, they can be more valuable by buying more stuff, where you can get more of them into this specific program. The other thing is you can get them to refer more people. So asking for referrals now becomes another part of these loops. And are you supposed to hit all of these home runs the first time around your launch of some kids program, some fluffy little idea that you had for May when school gets out, you're probably not going to. It's okay. Your first version I would love for everybody's first version to address all those opportunities, right and address all the inputs that you need to in order to do this but you're probably you're probably going to get halfway there or something and you'll leave a bunch of effort on the table but maybe it'll be successful enough to make you want to try to make it better. Seeing how much meat You left on that ball is really, really, really valuable. And that makes these programs now when they're executed like this, like, really fucking awesome, because you got man, I didn't even I didn't get any referrals from anybody because I didn't try. I forgot to get testimonials, that puts me in a bad spot. But I got emails. So maybe I'll see I'll be less effective in getting my testimonials out of these people. Because it's been two months since they did it, it would have been great if it was after their final day, and the kids had an awesome time. But now you make that mental note for the next time around, right? Next time around, they get a follow up email. Hey, hope you had fun, please leave us a Google review. And just use that to start making content to pump the next then you follow up with them a little bit later. Asking about hey, referrals you have anybody be interested or simply send them an offer, they can forward to anybody else, or just say, Please, we'd really appreciate if you brought somebody in next time, then you follow up an offer, come in join, let's do this, here's a promotional offer for those of you that have done the camp, then you hit him up about the parents like all of a sudden now pretty comprehensive, nice little marketing strategy. It's all in post. That's the thing. That's the key for the success of these programs. It's not what you can do and what you can do in the week or two before the week or two to launch and try to sell. It's just not all that how you debrief and retool the marketing overall strategies after one of these programs is the key to your success, as the next one is going to be launched. The



John Fairbanks 26:26

The rest of you're always going to run into you and I Tyler is that we're going to drag you into deep water and we're going to drown you pretty quick.



Tyler 26:33

Oh, yeah,



John Fairbanks 26:34

yeah. So understand that if you're somebody that has heard this, and you have any type of youth presence inside of your business right now, and you aren't doing any type of seasonal shit like this at all. We've just now waterboarded you for the last 25 minutes like this, and this and this and this, and this, you're not going to do all of this. The only way that you do all this is that you now have us then take you step by step, to help you execute this in your own business and we live working with you to do it. And even then, we're not going to recommend that you do every one of these pieces. Because if we're running this, like as sharp as it can fucking be, I want that last day, I want somebody that's there that's going to do video testimonials with kids and their parents on the spot. Like there's so many different levels to this game that is so far beyond, hey, I think parents don't have things for their kids to do. Because it's spring break, maybe we should do something. Yeah, that's where it was born. And we can take this so far out into deep water and make it so lucrative and have so many pieces, just like you said, Tyler, that now this is no longer Hey, this is a good idea. Because I think there's opportunity to where it is now probably, if not one of the most successful lead generation opportunities for the youth programs in your entire business. And you'll get three shots at it. And honestly, you don't need anything else. You literally could have everybody else go fuck themselves, because you already have exactly what you need. Because now you have this huge robust system that's functioning just off the I think it'd be cool to have some kids around for a couple of days to give their parents a break because of the outbreak and they don't have anywhere to put them.



Tyler 28:19

Now there's other opportunities to grow this thing from this project here. And this is a piece that we talked about a little bit with Austin toloza A while back was right about getting out in your community. You've done this once you've done this twice or maybe you haven't done this program at all. And you wonder why people aren't that interested. Nobody's ever heard of you. You're just some kind of strange autistic fitness guy who lives in the gym and then goes home and sits with his family and watch his or her family and sits and watches TV and rests and recovers and you eat your paleo diet or whatever this is and you live the life of a fitness hermit right like a lot of gym owners kind of do and guess what? Nobody fucking knows who you are. You're not out there you're not really out there being involved you're not even giving this coach who is involved who coaches a bunch of these kids this gym owner we're talking about today who is not Austin but the one for the program that we're talking about today. Right even said he was like shit. I went to this one facility for soccer , this outdoor basically sports complex that was right in our area. For the sport that I'm not normally a part of. Was it lacrosse or anywhere it was lacrosse. And it was like, holy shit. There's a ton of kids here. I don't know any of these kids. He goes Damn, it was almost eye opening to him. He's like, my business is coaching kids at this age and doing an offseason you know, doing strength conditioning and performance coaching. And I'm so not involved in any of these people's circles at all. And that that was really eye opening for this gym where he went okay, all right, and not like jarring. Oh man. I've been fucking up. It's like a great opportunity. So it's like, okay, I got one of my coaches who's from Oh, you're maybe with this sports and maybe she goes out and maybe I pay her to volunteer a little bit like, once you go get, I'll pay an hourly wage you give me you spend like two hours a week just out there helping with the team or helping with this or that or just be president wear the shirt, be involved, like get out there and do some stuff, maybe end up picking up a coach and a team of 10 year olds for these sports seasons are like fucking five weekends long anyways, for the most part at that age. So it's like, maybe that's an angle, it might make that five weeks if you make no, no money on those hours. And making it fun for the kids might make you an extra 15 to $20,000 that year.



John Fairbanks 30:37

And I think that what that strategy that you just did, right, it's a whole separate, like, we could dedicate an entire episode to it. That isn't where it starts. So understanding like for gym owners is so easy. You're running your business, you're doing what you're doing. And maybe you have these young coaches that are around, and they're hungry, and they want to be able to be successful. They are personal training, they are doing a little bit on the side, but they have time. And this is where you have trained, if you're lucky enough, right to have staff that are between the age of 19 and 25. They're not married, they don't have kids, like they have time. This is one of those things where a lot of times like wow, I want to be able to get out into the community more. And the idea, right, and we've heard this before for gym owners like well, I've gotten a bunch of stuff. It's got flyers like we've made a thing that's about you, Joe, about you. And we got flyers, and I want you to go on, I want you to hand them out to people, right? This is wanting to go hand out to people at the sports complex, so they get to know you. This is not New York City. People are not used to having people stand on the sidewalk and hand them pieces of paper for advertising, correct? Not if I'm at a sports complex, and a motherfucker is walking around and handing me sheets like a personal trainer and advertising. One, you're gonna be like mad kudos to you for being this bold, and like to be this extroverted to walk around and strike up conversations while kids are trying to watch their kid play sports. But also, fuck you.



Tyler 32:11

Yeah, like, oh, by the way, you know, better luck, give us some popcorn.



John Fairbanks 32:15

Sure, we'll walk around and then sell water. And then you can sell the water with the flier. But, and that's where it's, the principle is right, which is you want your coach to be out in the community. So go and earn trust. And this is where we pivoted that spirit. And the exactly what you described is exactly what we recommended, which was, instead you have this person that wants to be in the community that wants to be able to go after this demographic. Go, go be a coach, go be an assistant coach, then you as a gym, go sponsor that team. If you spend the $350, or whatever it is to sponsor a team to put your name on the back of the shirt. It'll get you zero fucking leads. I promise. I



Tyler 33:00

will absolutely fucking back that claim up. But let me tell you about John, your assistant coach. Yep, that's right, you just assistant coach with this. And then maybe after the season's over after the last day, maybe by the way, at the end these are just silly little fun ideas. But at the end of the year, a little four weeks, soccer season or whatever this is. You have a fun day. And next weekend, where you like, hey, for an hour, just a team and anyone else that you guys are friends with your friends and family. We're gonna have pizza, and we're gonna have pizza and Gatorade. We're gonna do it at our gym. Thanks, everybody, all the families for coming. You guys want the kids to play and the kids to be active and talk to the adults. You're given away fucking $85 for the pizza and some of your time. And you will fucking rule all their goddamn ideas when it comes to where am I going to train my kid, there's no other there is 0% chance of somebody else having any market share for you at the market share. What's the word competitive market share in the market that you're in, within that group of people anymore? It's fucking over. So you can really really begin to start to dominate an area people talk about. By the way, this is a nice little opportunity. I have a client of mine who's a dance instructor. And she's like, same deal for a lot of gym owners if they go out there all this time where I'm like my biggest expenses mortgage, you know, is the building that I'm using. And it's like I got all this time where it's just not being used. So she started having some of her like, you know, high school aged students, some of our better students that are really experienced. So I just ran a little birthday party. So if kids wants to have kid wants to have a birthday party, the parents can bring a pizza, they rent out the space for a few few 100 bucks and then a person you know one of the students goes in and teaches them some fun dance stuff and then they play and it's TAF structured but mostly not then like all these people are in your place dancing and you got paid to get them there. Whatever looks better? What a great idea. And so these are the steps, this now becomes once this program is up and running, and you're doing the thing now, you look around and go, all right. So like I can already, I can already hit the ball way over the fence. Okay, you already know you can do that. Now, once you've gone through this a few times, you know, you can put the ball out of the park. How now can you get some runners on base first? Yep, so we're not just getting one run out of this, we want five we want four, five would have been super aggressive. But I think that is a thing that a lot of people miss. And this obviously the last thing is, it's networking, it's a bit of a service as well. But like this is the piece that we've always talked about when working with coaches directly is that this line of work is not sales as a part of it. But this line of work is service. And it's not just that we are performing a service, it's, it's a life of service. And you shouldn't, this doesn't mean you shouldn't be paid well for it. But people absolutely need this service. But it should be in the spirit that you can make all the goddamn money in the world, if you are just really really good at serving people. And



John Fairbanks 36:08

Tyler, there's not a better investment. When you do youth sports, a lot of times these little rec leagues and stuff. It's an hour during the week for practice, and an hour for the game on the weekend. Two hours as a gym owner, let's say you pay your person $20 an hour, let's say you do that, which would be great. $40 A week or seven weeks, you will not have a better investment of marketing. If you're paying for your coach to be there to coach kids, you've sponsored the team. And now you have all those things that we just talked about the idea of your marketing dollars going there and paying, there's not going to be more lucrative for you otherwise, unless that coach is literally doing personal training. It's not more valuable for lead generation. Yeah, right. We're not talking about fulfilling now. Now we understand that our fulfillment is being covered. And now you get these young hungry coaches, or you don't have coaches, they mean it would be great to get a personal trainer that wants to come in and I want to grow my side of the business there. But I don't have enough business yet. For these people that want to come in and I don't have any work. Well, you know, what, Hey, would you be? Would you be interested in coaching a basketball team for the local rec league and wearing our shirt, and I'll just pay you for your time to go do that. And that'll help generate leads and potentially would not only generate leads for the gym as a whole, because we're gonna have all the system that's in place for the post party and all that shit. But now, now I'm really putting you in a position to generate leads for yourself as a personal trainer as well, not just for the kids, but also for the parents.



Tyler 37:45

Yeah. And this now we pivot one more, one more angle here. This into networking. Right. And we were talking about this, you know, yesterday a bit because we talked about networking groups, and how the rise of networking groups when economic downturns happen and things like this. And normally a lot of these things where people have similar industries are getting in and helping each other out a little bit. And then also matching themselves with other industries, other people and other business opportunities. And we started looking through what goes on, at least in the United States. Regarding networking for gym owners, the only networking opportunities, probably that makes sense for gym owners based on the way gym owners are, is to be networking with literally everybody but other gym owners, like never bothered networking with other gym owners. They're your competition, they're always done. And I kind of get it a little bit because they're not going to send anybody your way and it is probably low value. But there is a larger picture here because gym owners don't get along with each other. Because they're really territorial, very often they're too dark, dogmatic they want to shit on anything that anybody who's not them is doing fitness wise, business wise. gym owners oftentimes are fucking haters. Don't take this personally, this is a gym wars podcast, I'm just telling you guys, you have a priority to being haters of other businesses. And by the way, this is an industry that has earned a lot of hate. So if your guard is up rightfully so, right there's a lot of scam artists and bullshit and hacks in this industry. So I get it, but you're predisposed, predisposed to being a hater. So you got to understand that a lot of gym owners are fucking kind of dorky about the fitness stuff so they're bad socially. It's a very we're right you're wrong type of arrangement. That you know is a gym owner's stance on fitness and health on why you should train at them because we're right and they're wrong. We know better than they do, we do it right, they do it wrong. They only do this and we do all of that and they do this stuff is dumb and that is kind of a lot of how a gym or less says about your community being great. That's literally the two biggest things when a gym owner tells me how great they are or how good their business is. What sets it apart from somewhere else. It's like our community and a less glossy version of, we're better than the other guys, because they're idiots. And we're smart, and they're stupid. And they do dumb stuff. And we do awesome stuff. And that's, that's the gist of it. So you have to remove the way that you network, the way that you think about other gyms and gym owners just need to get out there and actually network. And it doesn't mean doesn't mean being like, like, in my opinion, everything we talked about in youth sports is networking, and it's networking that really is great in the context of your business. But some of it is being the guy out there just having a conversation with somebody who's at a literal, structured planned networking event. Those things are boring, those things I used to have to do for other other industries I was in and they were boring. And they had very little value to me personally. Except that because one of the businesses did well, some people saw me there, they knew who I worked for, they knew I was interesting. If you connect a human to a business, and a good conversation about a business, it's a lot more valuable than people think. Because we've always talked about when someone's looking for the particular service that you offer. Are you the first one they think of?



John Fairbanks 41:12

If not, how do you company, not the company, right?



Tyler 41:14

By the way, let me rephrase that the company is the company the thing you think of the company becomes the first one on the list, because of a person that they know, right? Whether it's a person who was friendly or really jacked at this meeting, or really seems smart, like he knew what he was talking about, or it was just really, really funny, or we saw in there, like, Oh, I remember that guy. What's he doing? And that stuff is fucking valuable. Me personally. Don't get me wrong. It's really tough for me. It's tough for me to do those things for all of the reasons I described. Because I'm too dogmatic. I'm territorial. I'm a hater. I'm a bit of a fitness store, and all those things, it's real. So you're better off just going out and being cool and having fun and not making a bunch of business. And then eventually, it all works out anyways. Like, and if you're not fucking cool. Get it together, guys. What we are doing in this business is pretty fun. You got you got a pretty cool fucking job. Right? So, like, everything's pretty marketable what we do as gym owners. Like it's really fucking marketable if you're good at it. So I don't I don't understand the aversion to it. You just got to do a version of it that works for you. Do you have to be the last person there before the kegs tapped out? Probably not. Can you make a goddamn appearance and be friendly, act like you want to be there. There's no gym owner that isn't very, that is not the type to go walk up and be the first person to shake somebody's hand. Hi, how are you doing? They're just assertive. Like, there's a thought that that's for regular business people. And it's like you got you trust me, they probably if the money was all the same, they probably rather do what you do a lot of them a lot of because a lot of work. For all the reasons a lot of gym owners get into this line of clocking just live in the gym, I'd be in such good shape. Oh my God, he's so fun. He's working out all the time, like bla bla, bla, bla, bla. And like, so there's a bit of an aura around that line around this line of work and like, fucking be about it. I don't know. And that's the kind of like the furthest out opportunities where it's like when we're talking about how to make this camp work. Well, the next time and the next time was the next time we I think we've shored up a ton, a ton of gaps here. And I think there's a ton of new opportunities from Version A, B, C, and D and every new iteration of this program you're running. Now, listen, if you grow by 50%, every time you get to, you have a different kind of problem. You have a totally different kind of problem. And so let's pivot to one more spot before we go here, John. Okay. As we already addressed this, we're on number three with this one. The third one is the one we're currently selling.



John Fairbanks 43:41

Was it the fourth? This is going to be the fourth one. Okay.



Tyler 43:43

So we've executed on three. And now we are looking at well, this is nearly at capacity. All if at this current capacity, it doesn't even work for the one in the winter, because they all gotta be indoors. So the question now is, one, does the price have to go up? I don't know. Probably not. Maybe not. Maybe we just don't need to wring every dollar out of this as possible. But the question is now all of these marketing tools, strategies and processes that you have in place, are you now in a position to do a fourth one that's a big ticket theme. Correct. And that's where now once you have these tools to go from a 20 person camp, to a 30 person camp to a 40 or 50 or 60 person camp. And now it's really easy to sell. And you have so many people beating on your door, all the same things that you do to execute the promotion, marketing and sales for that. Now you just have a new product, it's not the same, it has to be better, has to have value but maybe you got a $1,500 product, a $1,500 or twice a week arrangement or a $2,000 summer thing. It's the whole summer, that's a couple three times a week or that's unlimited as many times as they can make or whatever that package is right now. All of this skill the list you have In context, you have the testimonials you have the involvement in your community, all of that stuff now gives you the ability to maybe you're not going to sell 45 $1,000 products this time, but you might crank out 20 might crank out 15. And this is where I like learning these things at a low cost, easy to fulfill, but not super low. Like we even said to have a citizen on the show. Like, it's important to note that this being amish product, it's not a $20 product, it's not some throwaway shit. It's not some shit that somebody can sign up for it isn't gonna go at $10 A kid some of this stuff that's like that, nobody gives a fuck that not your price. So cheap, nobody gives a shit to like, value it at all. There's Okay, yeah, whatever man drop, it's just fucking some silly little daycare, dropping them off to play laser tag, put 30 bucks in their pocket and see him at three hours. Right at that because it is significantly more expensive. Well, you can make a really expensive product now. And all of the skills that you've learned and developed and the processes you have now, you're good enough to now earn 30 to $40,000 off a specialty program, you're good enough to do that. You've got you don't just get to this is the problem. People want to open a specialty program, because they think it's a big ticket. I got a big ticket program. Now this big ticket program is gonna give me 30 grand. Okay, cool. But you don't know how to market it. Nobody knows what this is. Nobody has any real life, there's no testimonials about what's going on, you don't have a big email list, you don't even really know how to execute an email list and affect your email list effectively, your sales process sucks. You can't communicate accurately what this program is or the value it has for people, you got no involvement in your community, like there's a lot of fuck, and then these people sell one or two. And the problem is there's nothing worse than selling a big ticket product. And having one person buy it now you got to fulfill for one person who also now looks around and feels like they're the only person doing this Oh shit. Nobody wanted this. Am I a mark? It was soccer that made it very hard to build for the next. It's very important that when you get into the big ticket stuff that you have the skills to actually earn the money. And it's not fulfilling. It's like it's in all of this stuff. Can you market it? Can you sell it? Can you do it effectively? Can you build it from one thing to the next? Because then if you run these big ticket plays two, three times a year, also, you're making an extra 100 grand a year? Oh, yeah, this is the problem is we want to have this big ticket clout and this big ticket bump of money. But we don't actually have the skills to earn that money. We think just a big price tag does it for us. No, it's in your marketing strategy. It's in your networking, it's in your follow ups, your email stuff, your ads that you run for it, all of this stuff is where you actually possess or develop the skills to be worth a 30 $40,000 bump in your business. gym owners get a little greedy and they just see big price tag go, oh my god, maybe if I just don't do fuck all 10 people will just come up and hand me it because I put him at 1500 bucks, because I just posted a thing on Instagram once it emailed nobody and didn't do any follow up and didn't make any content to support it. And that's the biggest thing I see with gym owners failing with big ticket stuff is because they suck at promoting it. And they never learned how to promote fucking anything. And they're trying to build a big ticket program off of these, like, mild successes that if you have a mild success free youth summer program, that's one thing. And you can't tell me why. And you can't tell me how you would grow it from year one to year two, well, then you're going to really eat a huge play to ship when you try to learn Big Ticket



John Fairbanks 48:36

program. And even worse, you're gonna have folks that are predatory that are trying to help you. And instead they push you into a big ticket, they sell your soul and cut your throat because they're gonna now have a paid in full play that gets them paid. And then all you're gonna make 40 grand in the first week, and then you just fucked yourself. You know, I mean, like, it just is, it's, that's, that's what ends up happening. And to hit on the one thing you brought up, which is like, well, you know, once we keep selling out, do you make me more expensive. And this is where you can fight that urge because of everything you just described? Is it, Daria, you don't need to because like, at that price point, you're now getting that list is growing those people that are a potential pool because your money maker, six grand is great, right? $135 times 45 $6,000. That's the fucking tits for three days of work. Right? So for three days of work, that's not the point. The point is that those are now people that are invested in you. They had a great time. And now they're primed to either work with you after that camp is over to come to the next camp. Or more importantly, do that higher ticket play because now you have the OP now you've earned and this is earning your position, right. We all know what that shift is from coaching from being an athlete and needing to earn the position And you can't shortcut your shit. Everybody wants tips and tricks and fucking shortcuts and social media bullshit that's gonna allow you to cut corners to be able to make money and you don't. That's why that shit is smoke and mirrors and it's fucking vaporware, you've now earned the right to run a high ticket shift for the for the summer that, run it for eight weeks, run it a few times a week, run it for a few hours, each one of those sessions, and now to $2,000 per person proposal. And now you're talking about a whole fucking thing where just like you said, Tyler, and 20 kids total, you don't need 45, you just need 20 for the eight weeks of sign up, because their parents have have to work and those kids have to go somewhere. And now you've earned the ability to have the trust in those families to then put that money down, because they're going to pay somebody else there's going to be another fucking community program is going to run it's not going to be the same level and the same level of trust. And now just like you said, you're gonna run an eight week deal. And you're gonna run for two grand, and you're gonna make 40 $60,000. And it's like, holy shit, what have we done, and then



Tyler 51:06

you can flexibly fulfill because you've got money, you need to bring more staff on, you can do that if you have the resources to do this. So yeah, that's how we got here today. I hope we help you guys through this process. Let me tell you, John and I, we both said here that like, you know, you guys can do this you can do you're not gonna be able to execute all these things right away. But I want you to if you care to do this, if this episode connected with you go back and listen again, with a pen and paper and really write down how you would address each one of these little things that we dropped. How would you do the email? How many times would you say how many times? Just tell me how many times you would send an email out to your people and write that down just for yourself. So plan this out through what we discussed in this episode. And I promise you, you will save yourself some learning pains, some growing pains and troubles and you will save yourself some missed opportunities for this first time or this next go around that you have. Okay? And that may make you a shitload of extra money and then you will be sharper in this process so that by the next time it's even better than the next time it's even better. So if you want us to work with you directly on how to hold your feet to the fire that executes these issues from week to week and program to program and launch to launch to launch to relaunch. Get with us at the gym owners. revolution.com So thanks a lot for listening to everybody. Follow the show at gym owners revolution on Instagram. Follow me at Tyler effing stone this Tyler eff ironstone John,



John Fairbanks 52:28

you can follow me at J banks f L. Thanks for listening everybody.



Tyler 52:32

See you next week.















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