Does Your Gym Have a Personality? with Mark Fisher

[00:00:00] Hello, my friend on today’s episode, I’m back with Mr. Mark Fisher, and we are talking about how to inject personality into your gym. If you have been thinking a little bit about your personal brand as a gym owner and how to get more of yourself reflected into the brand of your gym, into the personality of your gym, this is a great episode for you.

Mark Fisher Fitness is kind of fun. Famously a big personality gym, but even if your mascot isn’t a unicorn, this episode has lots of tips and tricks for how to bring some, some color and some defining personality to your brand. So if that’s you keep on listening and quick disclaimer, I’m outside today.

So my audio might sound a little bit, a little bit different, but, but I’m enjoying the sun while it lasts. So thank you for your patience in my audio quality and enjoy this episode.

Welcome to the business for unicorns podcast, where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their [00:01:00] business. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym. Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Let’s begin.

Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the business unicorns podcast. Before we jump in to my conversation with Fisher today, I just want to let you know that we have a fantastic webinar coming up in a few weeks. It’s called the gym lead blueprint. It’s not a webinar. It’s a masterclass.

We’ll get to your thoughts on it in a second, Fisher. It’s called the Gym Lead Blueprint. Monday, September 9th, 10 o’clock Eastern. It is a virtual masterclass held with Mark Fisher himself. It’s online training and the title of the focus is five ways to generate more leads right away this [00:02:00] month in less than three hours per week.

Uh, so the idea is that Fissure is going to give you, not the idea, the whole design of the masterclass is to give you the exact steps you need to take in less than three hours per week to generate more leads. And the cost of the virtual masterclass is 47 bucks. So for 47 bucks, you can spend two hours with Fisher and we gives you very clear marching orders for generating more leads in your gym.

What do you want to add to that Fisher? Besides my intro was all wrong. Yeah. Yeah. No, not much. I’m really excited to do this. I think this represents the most up to date synthesizing of how I’m thinking about what gyms need to do. And importantly, what are the most important things they need to do? Cause the challenges, particularly if you read.

my book at jimmarkmansecretsbook. com, which you can get free. There’s a lot of things, right? So this is, I think a little bit more like do these things, including two strategies that I don’t really see people doing a lot at all. One of which is new, even to us in the past couple of months that I haven’t really talked about really on any podcast date.

And then my favorite [00:03:00] part actually might be at the very end, which will be the least sexy part that none of you will be aroused by, but I will break it down. And Here’s exactly how you spend 12 hours per month or 20 hours per month or 60 hours per month. So you have very clear marching orders about if, how, if I were in your shoes, I would spend that time to grow your gym.

Yeah. And I think for all of you, this is a, such a valuable time to spend two hours, whether you’re just getting your gym started or you’ve been in business for a long time. This is a plan that will help you tighten all the screws and get more people in your door. So go down to the show notes below, click the link and sign up.

I’m sure for sure. I’d love to see you there. Yeah. I just say briefly before we div in the recording is available, but only people that register. So if you register, you will get a recording if you can’t attend live. Fantastic. Yeah. Love that. All right. So let’s dive into today’s topic. And today’s topic actually was a question that came to us from one of our beloved Unicorn Society members, who’s actually over in the UK has a fantastic gym over there that he runs.

It’s Harry Morris. Hey, shout out to Harry. And Harry asked us this question a [00:04:00] while ago, and just, I wanted to get to it today, which is how do you think about creating a personality? in your gym. How do you think about bringing some personality and character to your gym? All too often, a lot of gyms, this is really true in the UK.

I know we’ve had, Harry and I have had conversations about this, that a lot of gyms in the UK are just like, dudes open up gyms, planning, painting the whole interior black and putting up like a one word name at the, on the front. And it becomes like this very kind of sterile, Serious dark environment, which is fine.

And that’s lovely. And a lot of people I think are attracted to that. And I think Harry’s question comes out of that experience of like, wait, I want my place to have some personality. And, and so let’s tackle this question today. Fisher, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about creating a personality in gym?

Certainly MFF is a place that is if known for anything, we’re known for having a personality. Yes. Yeah. I think there’s two things. Two big models I think of when I think about injecting personality in the gym. [00:05:00] The first is not right for everybody. I’ll be the first to concede this, that we’ve done this with MFF and to some extent, Biz Funicorns, though, notably not at all with Alloy, which is of course, having a strong personal brand.

Right. So a lot of injecting personality into the business is injecting your personality in the business quite often. Now, this isn’t the right strategy. I think necessarily for everyone, there are some people that prefer to be a little bit more behind the scenes, but honestly, if you’re running a small business, You need somebody to be the front man, right?

You need to be somebody out there playing guitar, shredding riffs, singing high notes, because otherwise a lot of these small businesses can come across in unhelpful ways as somewhat faceless and corporate, and it is trite, but nonetheless, true that people don’t. Want to work with a business, but they want to work with a person.

So I think if you are able to leverage your personality in ways that feel appropriate to you, that I think would behoove you. And examples of this are things that will make you relatable to the people that are interested in joining your [00:06:00] gym that make them feel like they know you. So small examples here are telling stories about your personal life in your email or Instagram content.

It could be. leveraging your story about how you got into the industry. It could even be talking about the things that you’re noticing in yourself or in your clients fitness. If you can, I think do that in a way that’s reflective of your personality. I think the only thing that I would caution with this, which I don’t see being issued so much in the gym space, sometimes I think of the influence for online trainer space.

I see this is optimally these things are being done in the service. They’re being done in the service of building relationship, of adding value, of Not making it about yourself, but in fact, doing your best to actually stand side by side with your clients and be a co traveler with them on the journey.

And so I too have struggled with X thing or, so I think that’s the first model star was, I’ll pull up their killer frames, sort of insights or other observations you might have about that. No, I think it’s a great way of [00:07:00] thinking about it. And what was coming to mind, honestly, when you were talking was, I don’t know that, forgive the analogy, maybe it’s, maybe it’ll break down quickly, but it feels a little bit like creating a profile on a dating app, which is really want to be authentically yourself, but you’re also passing it through the filter of what are the parts of me that are most relevant to the kind of people I want to attract.

And can I shine a light on like those parts of myself that are real to me and authentic, but also. Appeal to the kind of people that I want to either date or have as clients or have as team members. And I think that is a great way to leverage a personal brand and a personal reputation. And I think that your emphasis, I think I really appreciate, which is it’s really in service.

In service of the people you want to serve, right? It’s putting the part of you forward that is going to be the most appealing to them, either because they’re looking for someone with real expertise or looking for someone really friendly or looking for someone to really challenge them or looking for someone who they want to look like or aspire to be in some way.[00:08:00]

Right. I think there’s lots of ways you can shine different lights on different parts of your personality. I think that’s, it’s a great way to look at it. So yeah, two thumbs up. I agree. Yeah. What else do you say? There’s a few other ways you think about it. So what’s another way? Yeah, I think the other way I think about this is very similar, actually, just branding more generally, which at a high level for me is the words and the colors, right?

And again, this too, I think comes out of getting clear on who you are, what your values are as a business, and again, arguably you as the founder. And then who is it that you’re looking to serve, right? Real clarity on your avatar, the person that you’re making the business for. And I think if you’re really clear on the values that are important for the business and what your ideal client profile, your avatar, whatever word you want to use is going to be drawn to, I think that should optimally inform.

everything from the fonts and the colors and the visual feel of the business, but importantly, also the lexicon, right? One of the ways that we [00:09:00] mark ourselves as part of a culture and community is the words that we use. Now there is, this can be done, I think, in ways that are helpful and less helpful, right?

It’s hard to make fetch happen, right? You don’t want to be like, nah, this is the new cute word that we use and I’m just going to use it. And your clients are just not into it, right? But having said that, you know, obviously MFF being a shining example of this, there’s something to be said for thinking of phrases, words, symbols, images, mascots, iconography of things that are reflective of both what you believe in, your values, who you are, and the people that you’re looking to serve, right?

So Mark Fisher Fitness. obviously to this to a very extreme extent. We don’t call our members clients. We call them ninjas. It’s not a gym. It’s the enchanted ninja clubhouse of glory and dreams. We don’t use this term quite as often because the business evolved, but health and hotness was a term we used for a long time.

Obviously the unicorn is a mascot. So I think that if nothing else might be another potentially actionable takeaway here is just doing a quick like 10 minute [00:10:00] workshop on this with a cup of coffee. In fact, I used to make people do this. We haven’t done this particular kind of content a long time, and it might be worth circling back to you, but just as an experiment, if you had to pick a mascot for your gym, what might that be?

Right. So what’s my Matt Casey’s mascot? Oh, he’s a puppet. He’s a puppet. Francois. I forget his name though. Francois. That’s exactly it. It’s so good. Yeah. Yeah. One of our clients, and this is interesting too. I think shout out to us, shout out to us. If you look at the Unicorn Society members, everyone from like Matt Casey to.

Cassie date all day fit to Mike and Teresa at re imagine like the fury at speakeasy of strength. There’s a lot of colorful gyms in the Mark Fisher or sorry, the business unicorns universe that are not Mark Fisher fitness. And again, I don’t mean to make the sound like it’s just the fonts and the colors and the words, but that really is a lot of it.

I think also whether you actually want to go public and make that your mascot, that’s up to you. I think you could also, Consider what’s [00:11:00] called the fancy psychological turn is I think a shared superordinate. I think it’s what’s called. It’s funny to call your people something right skate. So don’t use ninjas.

That’s, I don’t know. I guess you can use that. Sure. Not in New York. No one will know steal our stuff, but is there some sort of moniker that you can adopt for your appliance if you had to? And again, I’m not saying you’re doing this, but if you had to rename the gym as something, What would you call it? If not a gym, I think those are some examples, right?

And again, different cultures, different sets of, I think, ownerships and clients. Are getting more or less open to this to the defense of a lot of, yeah, you’re right. The UK is like hilarious. They’re literally mostly all black, mostly dudes, arms folded, some great trainers out there, right? You sometimes you get pops of red, right?

And I’m confronting all of you and you’re like, Oh no, I’m in the UK and I’m black with a pop of red. Not all. Yeah. Look at a Chris Burtis. I think curious, the curious gem, his spot. He’s got a full mural murals. Oh, he’s got a thing going on. Yeah. [00:12:00] I don’t want it to oversell this because I also don’t want you to do something that’s actually going to.

turn off your ideal client, right? If you’re working with like very reserved, conservative, let’s say your target is conservative men whose faces don’t move in their mid fifties that are intentionally living in unexamined emotional life and that’s the way they like it and that’s what you want to serve.

Maybe, yeah, maybe if you, Don’t want to go too hard on the Pegasus, but I do think if nothing else, just going through that experiment is value. And I’ll give you actually one other exercise here that maybe doubles back a little bit on the personal brand. And I did this once with a coach that I worked with.

Shout out to Takimura. I thought this was really useful, where he had us go through an exercise where you had to identify all your cameo characters, he called it. So if you think about a show like Seinfeld immediately, who else is there besides Jerry? Like immediately, even I don’t even watch Seinfeld, right?

You’ll know it’s touched it’s Elaine and Kramer and Newman. So who are your side characters? So if you think through where the places that you are, what are [00:13:00] your hobbies? What are the foods that you love? If you have an animal that you can bring into this, another like old school, direct marketing move that people do from time to time is they write an email from their child or they write an email from their dog as a sales email.

So those are just some ideas. And again, I’m not suggesting you do any of them literally, but some things I think to play with, and there might be something for you to actually implement. Yeah. I think those are all great Fisher. I want to just like, yes. And all of those, and maybe just add one or two more considerations that are Probably adjacent to what you shared, but just maybe a different flavor is, I think longterm starting with you as the owner, I think is a great way to think about it or starting with a brand that you want to, that makes sense for the people you want to attract.

I think there’s a great way to think about it. I will say over time, if you’re a gym that winds up having a larger team of trainers, your longterm reputation. Is really driven by people’s experience with your people, right? What people think and how people think and feel about your gym, really long term when you have a training team becomes about their relationship with the people they interact [00:14:00] with when you’re at your gym.

So I think when you’re thinking about creating a personality, you’re creating a personality. Personality at your gym. Every time you hire someone, every time you hire someone as a choice about another ingredient you want to add to the soup of your gym personality. And so I think thinking through at the very least, we talk about all the time that there’s a values alignment.

There’s people who showing up in a similar way in the world and that they have similar things that they care about that I think that’s useful to make sure there’s some consistency in the personality you’re developing as a team. And making sure that obviously you fire fast when there’s people who are really Not fitting in and creating a personality or a vibe or an experience that doesn’t fit with what you want.

Cause I think people remember the interactions they have above all else. So I just want to, I want to do a shout out to that. I think that same goes for your clients. Obviously every time you let a new client in the building, you’re letting in another personality that contributes to the feel of the building.

Of what it feels like to be in your gym and there’s some clients that got to go Who rub people the wrong [00:15:00] way or don’t like to follow the rules And there’s some clients who add a new and magical flavor To your gym’s personality that you never would have expected or looked for before But they completely change the vibe and that can be okay, too So I say, we say all of this to say, there’s no one way to think about injecting personnel in your business, because it is this kind of complex stew of a lot of factors, but I think I love that you started Fisher with like you as the owner or you as a leadership team, or you’re mostly the owner for the people listening is if it doesn’t feel congruent with who you are.

Yeah. Then, then it’s not, none of the rest of it’s going to make sense. So it doesn’t start with something that feels right to you. That’s a space that you like to be in. That represents your interest and your approach in some ways to fitness and is attractive to your avatar. Nothing else matters. But over time.

You’ll maintain that look and feel in some way by making sure that the clients you invite in and the team that you hire are also aligned with that vibe. Yeah, what would you add to that? [00:16:00] Yeah, I think that’s another thing that I do think, in retrospect, we did a very good job of outside the gate. I recall the very first meeting we had where you came up with like a PowerPoint, because we’re going to do gym, I guess we got to get clear on our values and mission, right?

Uh, and you were the one that first codified, let’s call them all ninjas, right? And that, I think if you are to do this exercise that I had suggested, there is a next step you’re looking to implement, which is really getting the team on board, right? And making sure they’re down with it. Because if I was the only person that was calling them ninjas, that would have been the end of it.

But people were really singing from the same songbook. And I think we did a pretty good job of making clear to everyone how we were codifying things. And in fact, I can remember in those early days, one of the very strange, but useful, but in retrospect, hilarious conversations was when was something Mark’s bit that Mark was going to do as one of Mark’s bits.

or when were we going to adopt it? And we were all going to say this thing, right? So I want to give you examples of my bits because [00:17:00] they’re mostly not appropriate for 2024, but a lot of the bits we held onto, which you might’ve heard if you’re a long time B4U or MFF lover, things like giving the positions of the body names, right?

Instead of anterior rib cage flare, rib cage boner, instead of anterior pelvic tilt, Porn star, but even beyond that, I think we even adopt. And this is, I think is another thing that most of you could consider doing as part of how we reflect the values in the words that we use, adopting whatever phrases are that work for you.

And to your point, killer, a number of the trainers brought forth. Things, right? And again, they were often adopted, frankly, from personal involvement books, or I’m not saying that almost any of it was thought up by us, but things like, who do you want to be today? Or the various inspiration things we’d say that in the class that Brian Patrick Murphy or Stacey Jackson would bring in became part of our shared lexicon.

And then eventually we would codify them. Not only because we were drafting off of each other in an organic way, but we would in some cases like [00:18:00] literally paint them on the wall, right? We would literally do things to really make them a part of the physical space. And to my mind that again, that’s downstream directly of the values conversation.

But I think as an example of how this can be a dialogue and a collaboration with your team so that ideally it’s a shared project and not simply the owner coming down from on high with a tablets from the burning bush. Yeah, 100%. And I think people are often shocked when we explain to them how organic our development of our brand was.

People often think that at some point we sat in a room and decided all of this stuff. Um, that we would call them ninjas and we would do this, this, this. Think certain ways. And the reality was it all happened in conversation, in dialogue. What we tried to do was just observe what was happening naturally.

What kind of jokes to Mark tell? What kind of things that resonated with the ninjas? What kind of things with the new trainer saying that people thought was funny? What kind of things felt inspirational that we heard people repeat back to us? And then we would try to codify those things. That’s how really all culture is made.[00:19:00]

Um, and I think, but we were just trying to be intentional about listening and intentional about testing and then really. being thoughtful about, okay, we’re going to codify this. Let’s print it on the wall. Let’s put it, make it one of our values. Let’s teach us as part of our onboarding. I think that’s how you create a mythology.

Around a space and a group of people is you start to tell stories and speak the same language and shared history. Yes. And all of that, I think was part of it. So I think, I think while we started this conversation talking about just giving your gym a little personality, I think that what I’m. What I’m saying out loud and realizing is that this is really go a conversation that goes hand in hand with the kind of the culture that you’re building.

Right. The culture you’re building and the personality of the business. It’s almost synonymous. I could tease them apart for really being nerds, but I think they’re, uh, it might even also be synonymous with like your reputation, right? How people talk about you when you’re not in the room. I think all those things go hand in hand to create the environment where people.

Can’t wait to come back to an environment where people are excited to go and try new things and environment people are [00:20:00] excited to go and feel safe enough and brave enough to try new shit and fail. And this is the kind of culture I think all gyms need. And then how you make it your own can go in a million directions.

But, but yeah, I think so. Let’s wrap it up. I feel like we’ve covered so much good ground here. Hopefully you listeners have been taking some notes and you find something useful here, but how would you sum things up here for, for our listeners, Fisher? Yeah, I think certainly there’s some, hopefully some actual actionable things you could use from our exercise, like getting clear on if you don’t already have articulated set of values for the gym, that’s maybe one part of this conversation.

I think creating a list of your cameo characters, like the things you like, the things you don’t like, your hobbies, the places you are, seeing how you integrate that. I think going through some of those. exercises around if you had to pick a mascot, or if you had to pick a name for your clients, or if you had to give some other name for the facility training besides Jim, if you had to pick maybe three to six phrases that encapsulate the ethos of the training.

of the gym, what would they be? And then potentially if they [00:21:00] go well, starting to use them in the marketing, starting to operationalize them in the business. Uh, and then finally not to be underappreciated in a perfect world. These could be done in collaboration with people that already work in there, assuming you already have a team.

Yeah. Great summary. I love it. Thanks for the great conversation as always. And dear listeners, if you want to take the virtual masterclass with Fisher, come and join me show notes, Jim Lee blueprints, Monday, It’s a training, it’s a, but I might not be there masterclass, but I might be, well, this is the last podcast before Burning Man.

So if, so who knows if you’ll come back to planet earth, but if I die, then I assume my ghost can zoom in from the actual plane to give me knowledge. My daughter will miss me, but I’ll still tell you about Leeds, Jimonas. I’m sure. I’m sure. Have a great time at Burning Man, my friend, and we hope we have another podcast after this.

And if not, it’s been fun. Undefeated. Undefeated so far by Burning Man. All right. Have a good one. See you next time. [00:22:00] Bye.