How to Start a Gym and Make More Money | The Resource For Gym Owners
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
READ TIME: 4-MINUTES
Owning and Starting Your Gym
When you first open your gym, the only math you need to worry about is how many members you can get, right?
If you can only get 50 people, then you can afford to go ahead and make the jump into this gym ownership deal full-time.
You quickly realize that if you go from 50 to 100 people, you don't get twice as much money.
Tyler learned that the hard way when he started his first gym.
He had 50 members in the beginning.
"I kept my day job while I was coaching early morning and evening classes. I thought that if we could get more members, I could quit my day job and make more money. I thought that if I could get more members, I could start paying myself.
Because if I could pay myself, then I wouldn't need my day job.
We did a good job of getting people interested in joining and then signing them up. We went from 50 members to 105 in just a few weeks.
I thought I had figured it out and was doing great.
But that wasn't quite the case.
What I didn't know was that I was selling too cheaply.
And I just wasn't getting enough opportunities at selling just my base membership.
Do you know what happens when your classes have twice as many people?
We had more new clients in our classes than one coach can safely manage.
So I quit my day job to help cover the classes and to make sure all these new clients got the coaching attention that they needed early on in their relationship with our business. You only get one chance to make a first impression, so we did our best to make sure nobody felt left behind. Because if members leave because they feel underserved, they rarely ever come back.
Twice as much membership revenue was coming in, but I didn't have enough equipment to offer the classes properly. We were constantly ordering new equipment for the gym, just to keep up with demand.
Twice as much membership revenue was coming in, and I couldn't even pay myself. And I had quit my day job for this...”
I Just Need More Members
Tyler eventually sold his gym and had the opportunity to work for an online fitness company overseas that worked with coaches and gym owners. When Tyler moved to Europe, he met people who had the same problem that he and his co-gym owner ran into years before.
The mindset of "I need more members" comes with a belief that it will make their classes better..
But it will actually make their classes worse.
It ends up taking more of your time and money and creates more problems.
We've all heard "mo' money, mo' problems". Well, "mo' members, mo' problems" is no joke.
If you just keep piling members on top of each other into your gym, can you scale to 100? Yeah.
Can you scale to 800? Probably not.
Well, that's where the idea of diminishing returns comes in.
Learning From Mistakes
The pain points gym owners experienced in the States 5 to 10 years ago are happening in Europe, now.
And the more gym owners we've worked with, we've realized that everyone is attempting to deal with the same problems that plague gym owners worldwide, but in their own individual way.
Like recreating the wheel, over and over again.
Meanwhile, we were on the sideline talking to everyone and having the same conversations over and over again because we know what these problems look like because we've dealt with them all before.
It's vital that as gym owners and coaches, you learn from one another so you can accelerate your learning and avoid mistakes along the way.
You Need More Money, Not More Members
The biggest mistake that we work with gym owners on starts with their mindset.
And breaking the mindset surrounding members.
You need more money, not more members.
Get more money, then get more members.
The order of things matters a lot.
And without a strong community of trusted gym owners and coaches, some of these hard lessons end up having to be learned on your own.
It Starts With An Offer
Now, let us be clear...
You definitely need more members.
But getting new members is not the first thing you need to do.
You need to figure out what you're offering your people and how to present it so that it meets their needs and buying habits.
Pricing, class structure, and other things are important to look at when you start a business.
And if you zoom out a bit, most gym owners will find that they don't have the systems in place to support more members - let alone the ones you already have.
You can't make your business grow from 50 to 150 people by yourself.
You don't have enough resources or staff.
If you got 100 new members this month, it would be too much and you would not be able to give them the attention they need.
If you had 50% more members tomorrow, what would that look like?
If you do not deliver what you promise, people will not be happy. They will tell others that your classes are not good and that they got hurt.
If you had 50% more revenue tomorrow, what would that look like?
We want you to make more money without doing more work.
Is that fair?
It is important to think about what you want your next year to look like.
Would it be better to have 50% more members
Or
Would it be better than having 50% more money?
You need to decide which one of those is more important to you and your goals for the next two years, three years, four years, or even ten years from now.
Stop Trading Time For Money
We've all heard it before, "Don't put all of your fucking eggs in one basket."
But you still ignore that advice.
Gym owners love asking one another, "how many members do you have?"
It's like they're asking how big our d**k is.
And that question is missing the point...
There's more to it than that.
And we're quite happy with the girth and length - thank you very much.
Most gym owners are just chasing that total member number.
Leading to your literal dollar-per-hour value plummeting over the long run.
Every new member you bring in, gives you more work. More time.
Quit giving yourself more work.
The Takeaway
We want you to start doing things better.
Where do you need to start?
Answer this question: Do your members know everything that your gym offers?
Be honest.
Can your coaches explain to someone all the things you offer in your gym?
Can your coaches explain it well? Can your members?
Start working on fixing this problem, now. Don't wait...
Don't wait to make a change until you hit bottom.
We want you to be part of our online community of gym owners and coaches that have these types of conversations every week.
It's time to change your story.
Join the Gym Owners Revolution and start listening to The Gym Owners Podcast, today. It's free.
