How Chris Opened 3 Locations in 4 Years and Adds Net 20-30 Members per Month

[00:00:00] Ben here with business for unicorns. And I’m really excited to bring you a special episode of the podcast with Chris Travis. Chris is a BFU coach on our team and also the owner of SSP in Seattle. Chris opened his business in the heart of COVID and in the last four and a bit years has now has three locations, over 600 members, and is on track for over 1.

5 million in revenue this year, which is 500, 000 more than 2023. We dive into marketing, leadership, and operations of how he’s doing that. So you can see. So you can steal some of those best practices to grow your gym. But before we dive in, I want to remind you, if you haven’t already to pick up Mark’s new book, it is the little book of gym marketing secrets.

It’s all about lead gen and getting more prospects and turning those prospects into sales. I was fortunate to see the advanced copy of this and. It’s the book I had. I wish I had when I opened my gym is no fluff, it’s comprehensive and it’s honestly everything you need to know. So if you haven’t got it yet, click below and pick it up in the show notes.

See you soon.[00:01:00]

Welcome to the business for unicorns podcast, where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their business. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me each week for actionable advice, tips, and tricks. 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.

Hey friends, Ben here with business for unicorns. I am excited to welcome you to a very special episode where I’ve got the wonderful Chris Travis, who’s a BFU coach. Hi, Chris. How you doing? Hello, sir. Doing well. How are you? I’m doing fantastic. Thank you. And we’re going to be doing a deep dive into how Chris has gone.

Chris is on track to do 1. 5 million this year in two locations. He’s opened three gyms in four years, and this year alone, he’s adding half a [00:02:00] million dollars in gross revenue. And what I want to know, which is probably what you want to know, dear listener, is how the hell is he doing? So, yeah, great question.

Why don’t, yeah, we’re going to start super broad. How’d you do that, Chris? Give us the playbook, but no, I’d love to start with a little bit more about, tell us a little bit more about SSP. Cause you have a. Unconventional background for a training gym owner. So tell us, how’d you get into the industry? Yeah, I think so.

My back, I opened my first gym in August of 2020, if you can believe it. So during the pandemic and prior to that, I worked in technology and business. Most notably, I worked at Amazon corporate for about 10 years and spent a number of years navigating that corporate structure, learned a lot and brought all of that with me to the fitness world.

And then from there, I’ve opened three gyms in four years. It’s been quite a journey. Yeah. But what was it like opening a gym in the heart of COVID? Terrible. Yeah, I don’t, I signed the lease in, I think, April of [00:03:00] 2020, and I’d officially left Amazon in July, 2019. And started from the ground in fitness, just learning how to coach and kind of good mentor who put me under his wing and putting me in the right direction.

And so I learned a bunch of stuff and, and decided I wanted to give my goat opening a space. And the funny thing was that I’ve started looking at spaces and that was just like April, 2020, March, April, 2020 was when, It started to hit the fan and people were like, okay, something’s wrong here. And then everybody was like, we’re going to shut down for two weeks.

I remember the lease came to me during that two week shutdown, at least in Washington state. It was like, Hey, we’re going to shut down for two weeks. We’re going to see how it goes. And everybody at that point was like, Oh, okay, cool. Like we can stay home for two weeks. No problem. Like, it’ll be okay. I didn’t really know what was going on, but I decided to sign the lease anyway, because I was like, it’s great.

I’m going to give it a shot. Obviously it turned into much more than that, but that was the start of it. That’s cool. Key point here already is that you’re coming from one of the biggest companies on the planet in the corporate world. So it’s something that most gym owners [00:04:00] follow a very similar trajectory to what I did is I got into fitness.

I love training. I love helping people. The next step was opening a gym and it seems like it’s only one step ahead, but it’s actually, maybe it is only one step, but that step is miles apart from being a trainer. So you’ve got a unique background for being able to run an organization rather than just, I want to train people.

I’m going to do it in my own space so I can keep all the money. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I think this is the same story. Like a lot of trainers who open gyms are fitness people. They started off training people and then they decided at some point, the next logical step for them was to open a facility of their own, and then they go on the journey of, Oh shit, I got to learn how to run a business.

And, and thankfully, I think like. Michael Keeler always says is I had some batteries included. And so I, I came into the business side of fitness kind of understanding, still learning fitness side and what this industry was like, but inherently had a business background that has helped me tremendously as I’ve navigated this space.

Yeah. I’m curious, a little bit of a tangent here, but I’m curious, what are some [00:05:00] of the business skills that you found to be the most transferable from corporate entity, like Amazon to like a small independently owned agile business, like a gym that others could benefit from? Yeah, it’s funny. Like Amazon obviously is over a million people at this point.

And so you look at a company like that, it’s like, Oh, it’s a behemoth. And they have all of these things that happen. Honestly, Amazon is a company that. Spins up stuff really quickly and figures things out on the fly. And I always give the example to my team when we talk about SSP as we’re like flying an airplane and we’re putting the engine in at the same time, right?

We’re trying to figure these things out. And Amazon is exactly the same way. I worked on a lot of. Very new initiatives at the time, back in the Kindle business, I worked on launching retail expansion internationally. I launched on the, worked on the, the first kind of iteration of shopping with Alexa. And so all these spaces are incredibly ambiguous and they required a lot of kind of thinking, solving problems, encountering challenges, and that’s very much the small business owner life.[00:06:00]

You’re constantly encountering challenges and trying to figure out problems. And so I think I was used to that already. And then from there, it’s about, I think I already had skills in terms of operationally understanding how to run a business. So setting up a weekly business review, reviewing our metrics, talking about our metrics, making sure everybody is on the same page.

And then from there about team and people development, having weekly one on ones, making sure I’m developing my team, having a promotional path for them, making sure that they feel. Acknowledged and heard and developed and building careers in a field that they want to build careers. And I think those are probably the biggest things that I brought over from corporate into kind of the world that I am now.

Yeah. So it sounds like there was more transfer from Amazon than even I assumed. I just assumed large corporation, it’s going to be a little bit slow, but those are really innovative spaces that you’re helping launch. In addition, you learned how to run a business based on the metrics, not. Um, just the fields and probably most importantly, cause I hear this all the time from BFU members is I’m sure you do too.

Plus whenever I do any of our introductory calls for unicorn society, [00:07:00] across the board, the most important people thing that people want who own a gym is I want to really create careers for my team because they, and me, we all know what it’s like to be a trainer who feels underpaid, undervalued has the worst schedule on the planet.

Yep. And we want to do something differently. And usually it’s, I need to make more money. So that I can afford to create like actual careers for my trainers is doing good and leaving it better than you found it. So that’s really cool that, yeah, that came over for you to like how to really lead and manage a team.

Yeah. And I think when I, when obviously when I left Amazon to become a trainer, it was a. Shock to the system as far as what the industry looked like. I’ve been so used to a pretty well established career path knowing where I was going to go. And then I become a trainer and it’s, Hey, you’re going to, there’s all these different models.

You’re going to contract out of this gym, or you’re going to get paid per client per hour. And you got to work split shifts. You got to do all these things. And I was like, this is terrible. I really hate this. So it was one of my things. And one of my values when I opened my own business was I really care about [00:08:00] trying to create.

careers for people and trying to develop them into this industry so that they don’t. What I see ultimately all the time is people leave and they go either tangentially do something related like physical therapy, or they are like, dude, I can’t handle this industry. I’m going to go do something completely different.

And they give up on that. And that’s just really unfortunate. A hundred percent, maybe in broad strokes. Can you tell us some of the things that you do differently with your team at SSP that the rest of us could learn from? Yeah. Maybe let’s just riff and see where it goes. And then yeah, I think one of the experiences I had at Amazon was around.

Being understanding how to set up an organization and develop leaders in the organization. So I’ve done that kind of from day one with the mindset that I’m always going to tweak and evolve it as the business evolves, but trying to set it up in a way that was going to be sustainable long term that allows me to run three locations right now.

One of the big things that I’ve. took over from Amazon was like, you got to have one on ones with your people. You have to be constantly developing them, constantly [00:09:00] delivering feedback, making sure you’re very clear on what your goals are, the things that they’re tracking, making sure they’re delivering on those things.

And that’s ultimately going to help your organization and also give them autonomy to be able to do the things that they’re supposed to be doing and also give you some freedom because they’re working on the things and they’re delivering on the things that they need to be delivering on. And so that’s a big thing.

And, uh, and then from there it’s about, I developed. different levels within the organization. And, and so there’s a clear promotion path for people at SSP about how they move up, which obviously ties to their compensation, how they get more responsibility in the organization. And all of that’s super clear on our annual review process is super clear.

And I think that allows people to feel like they’re in a career path and they’re developing themselves and they’re taking on more responsibility and their scope is increasing. And that’s connected itself really well to business success. To be honest with you. Yeah, that makes total sense. So it sounds like regular one on ones, which.

So it’s typically weekly, bi weekly, monthly, what’s the frequency you recommend? Weekly, yeah, so it’s uh, it’s weekly with [00:10:00] your direct manager. At this point I have different layers in the organization, so there’s actually only three people that report in to me and everybody else layers down. So at this point I think we have four different layers, which I know is very uncommon for a gym.

Maybe not something I would completely recommend to everybody that don’t necessarily think it’s necessary, but across three locations, it’s something that we’ve developed, but definitely weekly with your manager, a one on one and then people that are like skip level. So people that are one person removed from me, I actually do still a bi weekly one on one with them.

And that bi weekly one on one is more, is less about tactically what you’re doing and what you’re delivering. Cause that should be happening with your manager. It’s more about. How are they thinking about the organization? What broad scale challenges do they have? What bigger questions do they have about SSP and the vision and where we’re going?

How else do they want to contribute? So I’m trying to tap in and have them, because those are still part of the leadership team and have them have an outlet with me to be able to have those conversations. That makes sense. So it’s weekly one on one with your direct report. And then I assume that those managers are meeting weekly with their direct reports.

[00:11:00] Correct. But you’re still, as you said, skip level to make sure people are enrolled and excited about the big picture. Yep. 100%. Which is a stark contrast to probably what we experienced as trainers. So I’m a trainer now. Next year I’ll probably train some people. Yeah. That’ll probably train some people. Yep.

And we’re asking the question of like, what’s next? Exactly. And we jumped to, let’s open a gym, but for a lot of people is the right call, but for a lot of people. It might not be the right call. They may have to be more fulfilled being in a leadership role at a place like SSP. Yeah, that’s true. All right.

That was very cool. Anything else from an organizational level that you’ve brought from Amazon that’s really led to you, you know, being able to run three gyms and not be running yourself ragged. Yeah. I think one of the things that I’ve. Try to establish is obviously each individual facility has their own leadership structure and their trainers underneath that.

I actually also developed a central leadership team that reports into me that also looks at all three locations. So I think about SSP wide. [00:12:00] And so that is a chief of staff who actually has all the facility leaders from each of the locations reports into her. I have a distinct marketing manager who’s doesn’t train at all, has no fitness background, she acts as a tech marketing background and has come over and is like a full time marketing manager with me.

And then I have a sales and member experience person who reports into me as well. And so strategically, we’re always thinking about these different buckets. And then at an individual facility level, we’re like, okay, The facility leads with their trainers are thinking about their individual facilities.

That makes a lot of sense. And just to give some perspective, how many people, let’s put the side of the leadership team that you just mentioned, how many people work at each facility? Yeah, it’s max three. All right. So you’re keeping it like small, lean, mean teams, which I imagine also allows you to. Create those career trajectories and compensate people appropriately.

Exactly. Yeah. I’ve always had the, and this is something that I don’t think is very common in the industry, but I found success with it is hiring full time roles and largely giving those [00:13:00] people full time work, they work on the floor, but they also have some other responsibilities that they have outside of the floor and they just work in that facility.

And I found, honestly, I think if you have the right development path for those people. And you have the right ownership on their side, and they believe in your mission and your values. You get a lot more ownership and care about your business from them, because they’re a full time employee and all they’re thinking about is you, rather than a trainer who’s working part time here and working part time here and really only cares about, I don’t blame them, really only cares though about their clients and making the money that they, maximizing the money that they can out of their facility and then leaving.

And I think having that level of ownership and buy in really makes a huge difference. Yeah, absolutely. So instead of hiring those trainers, like we need an extra 10 hours a week, cover those, find someone part time who can do 10 hours a week and then a couple hours of associated admin stuff. You’re bringing someone in on day one, it’s a full time salary hourly, but full time position.

Yeah. Yeah. There’s a, at the entry level, it’s hourly, but [00:14:00] guaranteed 40 hours a week. And then above that, it’s a salaried role. Got it. So there’s, there’s still that transition, but it’s not people who are full focus from day one. Exactly. Yep. So if there’s someone listening to this podcast who is, man, that sounds awesome.

My biggest obstacle has been, I have, you know, 17 trainers who all do one hour a week, I’m being facetious here, but how do you, like, how do you create enough, how is there enough work for someone to come in full time? What’s that look like for a gym that’s scaling from 20 or 30 grand a month, trying to get to half a million?

Yeah, I think you gotta be, you gotta be really clear about the, defining the roles that you need in the gym. What are the areas of ownership that you need in each facility? And I think for me, I have an overall kind of facility lead. Who’s a GM who looks over a lot of aspects of that business. And under them, there’s a couple distinct roles.

One is a membership specialist. So I think about everything past somebody committing into a recurring membership. They’re going to focus on. 90 day check ins and retention strategies and monthly [00:15:00] membership engagements and all of those types of activities. And then you also have somebody underneath them who is a program design person.

So, cause we do personalized programming for people like a small group format. And so they’re responsible for updating the few hundred programs we have at that individual facility on a regular basis. And then the facility leak oversees all of it. Those people are important to them. And then they’re also very much responsible for the lead gen prospecting side for their individual facility.

Got it. So someone’s really in charge of what I’m just going to call it, like the technical coaching aspect, program design, and someone else is in charge of the like relationship side of things. Yep. That’s it. But then one other person overseeing facility as a whole. And does that person coach? That person coaches too.

Yeah. They all three coach. Got it. So you’ve got like a, I’m just guessing here, but like 25 to 30 hours a week of coaching per person, maybe the lead is more like 15 to 20. Yeah. How it typically breaks out is we usually have three blocks in our space. We’ll have a six to 10 AM block, a 10 to two, and then like a four to eight, [00:16:00] let’s say block and each one of those people slots in.

So there’s different places and then the other four hours of their day are spent doing the other work that they’re responsible for. That’s right. I love that structure there. Cause that’s something that took me forever to figure out. I’m saying, I’d say I’m still figuring that out. But even just blocks was like, that’s revolutionary to a lot of trainers.

We’re coming from, Oh, it depends on my one on one people’s schedule. And you’ve got a 6am and no one at seven and no one at eight. And then you go to 9am, 10am, but nothing till noon. And then you have lunch and then you train to get seven billable hours. You’re putting in a 14 hour day. Yeah, I literally talked to a guy who has a gym phone on my location.

It’s only like 10 minutes away. He met up with me and he was like, cause he heard me actually on a different podcast and he was like, how do you only have. Two or three people at each location. How does this work? And I was like, they’re all full time. And he said, literally he has 20 people, 20 different coaches for one facility and juggling that schedule is a nightmare.

I was like, I can imagine. It sounds terrible. Your one on ones would take half your week. Yeah, exactly. Like, how does [00:17:00] that even work? That’s cool. I appreciate the kind of behind the curtain view of what those operations look like. Cause yeah, for sure. We’re going to get to the marketing piece. That’s what I’m also really curious about.

But, uh, I didn’t want to skip over the operations because for most of our gyms, maybe yours excluded, that’s running some like finely built machine here, that like getting 50 new clients might actually break us. We don’t have the operational agency. We don’t have the delegation. We don’t have the leadership.

Yep. The people know like who’s accountable for what. Yep. And that’s a really something that obviously do well at business for unicorns is like help implement those systems so that the business can scale. And that sounds like something you didn’t, you didn’t put the cart behind the, before the horse in that situation, which is great to hear.

Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent critical to doing so. And it’s, again, I think going back to my Amazon experience, it’s one of those things where that was honestly one of the first things that I did, because I think operationally I was like, Oh, we got to set this business up to be able to run efficiently. And I think from day one, cause literally when I opened my first gym, I didn’t, I barely did any [00:18:00] marketing.

Marketing is not a area for me that I have. A lot of functional expertise in from my corporate days. I managed marketers, but I never did marketing as an individual contributor. And so I don’t really have a strong background in that, but I do have a very strong background in running a business and operationally setting up a business to be successful.

And so that’s where I went day one. And that makes sense. Cause we’ll get, we’ll get some marketing a sec, but like you’re not spending a trillion dollars on paid ads. You said a lot of this is like word of mouth and referral. Yep. And. To get that word of mouth and referral and just like local social capital means that people have to have a really good experience Mm hmm everything from that birthday card not being late Yep you like everyone on the team knowing exactly who owns what step of that onboarding process and When that pass off or that handoff is to take care of that client something you really maximize referrals and organic reach Yes from delivering the product What you said you were going to deliver.

Yeah, that’s it. A [00:19:00] hundred percent. So I want to repeat that because it’s a missing piece when everybody’s asking, how do I get more leads? Yeah. It’s not spending 20, 000 in paid ads every month. No. And that, that can get a lot of leads. Don’t get me wrong, but if your attrition is. Seven or 8%. It’s really hard to outmarket that.

Yep. And it is a very big difference between, I got a lot of leads who signed up. Yeah. And I got raving fans who are telling everybody they know about this because it’s an amazing experience. Yep. That’s it. Hey there, business unicorns podcast listeners. I’m just making absolutely sure you have already gotten your free, instantly downloadable copy of my new book.

The little book of gym marketing secrets. You can find a link to download it in the show notes, or you can go to gym marketing secrets, book. com. I worked super hard to make sure this is a less than a 30 minute read and as a comprehensive overview of all the things you need to do to grow your gym, get more leads, more clients, and importantly, change more lives.

Again, find the link in the show notes where you can download your free copy at [00:20:00] gym marking secrets, book. com and now back to the podcast. So on that topic, let’s dive into marketing a little bit. So. How many, I’m curious, just to give some scale to this, three locations, three people per location, plus a leadership team.

How many clients per location do you have right now or an average or a target? Yeah. Total clients right now, we have 615, I believe is the number across the three. My spaces aren’t huge. So we like maximize every square inch of the spaces. My first location has just over 300. Second one has about 220 at the moment.

And the third one is hovering just above 80 right now, which we opened that third one just open to just open in May. Yeah. So how many, I guess I’m curious, like how many, we can work our way down the funnel. How many leads a week or per month are you getting? And typically where do those leads come from?

Yeah. SSP wide, I would say per month, we’re probably getting somewhere between 70 to 80 leads. So it’s not a [00:21:00] ton. Oh, uh, and a lot of those are coming from, honestly, most of those are organic. Cause I, I do Almost no paid advertising at my first two locations. Everything there is pretty much organic. Third one, I have been doing some paid ads just to drive more people into the gym faster, but yeah, about 70, 80.

And then I would say we get somewhere between 45, 50 in for assessments of that 70 and 80. And then we convert into recurring memberships, probably 30 to 40 of those a month. Those are pretty strong numbers. Yeah. Which tracks with getting it like as organic and referral. It wouldn’t surprise me if for every 10 leads you were getting two or three into an assessment.

That’s still terrible numbers. Yeah. And our net new number, our, our retention is very good. So we’re sub 2 percent across the board at both locations. So that’s about eight cancels a month across all of the locations. So we’re net 20 to 30 people every month. And that’s huge if you’re only losing eight people across all locations and that’s at [00:22:00] 600 plus members, that’s remarkable.

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s where the scale comes in is we were able to grow that way because I think people have a great experience and they come in the gym, so we’re not losing a lot of people and we’re not bringing in 300 leads a month. We also don’t need to bring in 300 leads a month. And so what are you doing or are you doing anything when it comes to referrals?

Cause you just say, yeah, we get lots of leads from referrals, but if you’re getting. 70 to 80 leads a month. Yeah. And it is from referral and organics. That’s not happening by accident. So tell us what have you done to make that easy for people to refer? Yeah. We talk about our, we have a VIP referral program, which is our Evergreen program, which we talk about all the time.

And that’s, it’s pretty simple, honestly. It’s a credit to the person who is the member of 30 and then a credit to the incoming person of 30 off of their trial. That’s super simple. We talk about a lot and we’ll get a nice study stream of people every month. Just, and honestly, most of our members don’t even care if they’re getting something or not.

They’re just like, we have such a great experience. I just [00:23:00] want to get my friend in here and that’s the way it should be. And then we do run like very special referral offers twice a year. So these are like. I call them like rare and delightful, right? Things that aren’t super common. And we call that a VIP plus where we actually give our members a free three week trial to give to anybody that they want.

And we actually just had an anniversary month in August, which typically is a slower month, right? Summer tends to be slower for training gyms like ours. And so we ran a big VIP plus promo, which was Give a free trial to a friend. If they come in, you get 50 percent off your next payment, which is a pretty aggressive promo.

We got 30 plus people on that promo come in, which is great. And I think when we were operating a business that has 600 plus people, having 50 percent off 30 memberships is not a huge hit to us. And it’s actually better because We’d want to convert those new people that come in the door. And we usually convert them at 40, 50 percent off a free trial, which is huge.

That that’s pretty much our referral strategy is like we’re evergreen, organic one going all the time. We get a steady [00:24:00] stream of those people. And then we run a very special one. That’s pretty aggressive with our members one to two times a year. Perfect. I was just going to summarize it and you nailed it for me.

Thank you. Yeah. Now, something you mentioned kind of offhand, but I want to go back to is with your referral program, you talk about it all the time. I suspect that’s where the magic is. I correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not sitting back and hoping people refer. So what does talking about it all the time look like so that you are reminding members to refer?

Without it making sound like you’re, every time somebody signs up, all they get is a sales pitch for more people. Yeah. Yeah. We definitely don’t want to make it feel like a sales pitch. We have, I would call them like mechanisms set up into the business to allow us to do this. So one of those is when somebody converts from a.

trial membership into a recurring membership. We hit them with a referral ask at that point and just make sure that they’re very aware of the program. So then with an automation in person text, how’s that? Yeah, it’s done as a, so our sales and member experience person will set up the membership and then they will send them an email, which includes [00:25:00] that information and then ask for a referral.

It’s actually also set up in the. Every membership, they have to fill out a commitment form. And so it’s also actually also in the commitment form that like, Hey, do you know anybody that you would benefit from this, you get 30 off. And so that’s something that’s semi automated. I would say on our side, we’re also just, we have an SOP and we’re also just talking about this all the time.

Our coaches know that if somebody mentioned somebody like, Oh yeah, I was trying to get my partner in the door here, but they’re having a hard time. Oh, cool. Hey, just you get 30 off. We’d love to have them in. Do you have a contact where we can just follow up with them? And surprisingly, some people will just be like, yeah, please hound my husband.

Here’s his number. Call him, do everything you can to get him in the gym. Because my, my constant reminding is not working on him. And so all he’s done is complain about his back for three years and I need to Someone else to take this burden away. Exactly. And so a lot of times, honestly, it just comes down to an ask, like making sure people are aware of it and just working it into organically in, in ways in your business that just makes sense.

So it doesn’t feel salesy. It just feels normal. It’s like, Hey, you’re having a great [00:26:00] experience here. Cool. Who else would have a great experience here? I’m just asking that question. It’s not coming from a place of the trainer thinking. Oh shit. I got to hit my referral last quarter for the week. Hey, Chris, I haven’t asked you for a bit.

Do you know anyone who wants to come to our gym? I’ll give you 30 bucks. Exactly. Yeah. That’s not going to fly. And then are you like role playing that with staff? Are they being reminded of it regularly? How do you, I know how easy it is for the trainer to get caught up in like the. The fulfillment side of things.

And sometimes forget that they’re the people who have the most power to draw, drive new business. Yeah. We talk about it all the time and we’re part of our weekly business review is actually going through. I was thinking about the weekly business review as reviewing metrics that you ultimately want your team to be.

Team’s behavior to be driven on. And so if you want to drive reviews, let’s review reviews as a slide in our weekly business review and talk about it because they know coming out of that review, Oh shoot, I got to ask for reviews. Cause I want to get a kudos in the weekly team meeting, business review, leadership team only.

Does it happen per location? What’s it [00:27:00] actually is our entire team. We’re spread out across locations. So we actually do it on zoom and we prepare metrics for it. So we use a version of the frameworks in business for unicorns, which covers kind of our dashboard by location and what that looks like. And every facility lead is responsible for reporting on their metrics and understanding their metrics.

And then we actually break that down even further into a, like a Google slide deck, like a PowerPoint deck. And we walk through individual slides on various metrics. And we actually, on a weekly basis, we’ll look at things like, you know, Who’s expired over the last week and who’s expiring in the next two weeks and the percentage likelihood that they’re actually going to sign up for a membership, right?

So we are, and the, the, the goal here is that the coaches who are on the floor, see this. They’re like, Oh, Ben’s expiring in a week. He’s at 50 percent right now. He’s given us this feedback. Who’s ever training him, whoever is training him next needs to be the one to follow up with him and come back to this meeting next week and say, okay, here’s the feedback he gave us.

That’s huge. Cause you’re not taking [00:28:00] everything on as the owner, which obviously you probably could not do across three locations, despite the skill set, but you’re also not putting it all on the facility lead, like you’re really empowering the trainers to be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a team effort.

And that’s what it has to feel like. And that’s why I care about trainers being bought in, but they want to be here and that they’re contributing in other ways to the business beyond just coaching on the floor. Yeah. Which ties in perfectly to what you talked about with that career trajectory that I suspected that trainer who’s been with you for whatever, six months to a year, and it’s really showing promise and training, but also is great with communication is learning about programming as good at generating referrals.

And it’s their to do’s done on time without being hounded. It’s like that’s someone you’re, you’re marketing for. Yeah. Yeah. The next role. And it’s important. They know that too, right? Like if you do a sit down with them, whether it be in a one on one or kind of a more formal review, it’s like, Hey, let them know, Hey, here are the things that you’re doing.

It feels like you really, this area of the business and are really, this lights you up, does that jive with kind of what you’re thinking? Yeah. Great. Cool. Like I see you [00:29:00] moving in this direction. Here are the things I want you to focus on over the next six, 12 months that we can start to put you in that path.

Yeah. And when you. A lot of gym organizations, whether it’s one or many locations, are relatively flat. It’s typically like, owner, maybe an admin beside them, usually part time trainers underneath. How do you create that career trajectory for that promising young coach without just creating a job that you maybe can’t afford?

Yeah, no, that’s a great question. I think I have a little bit of a benefit of having multiple locations running like a growing scaling organization. So I can, I have a little more flexibility in that front. I think if you run a single training gym, it becomes hard. And I think you also have to be willing to be like, Hey, these are the roles that we have.

Right. This is it. And I think you, not everybody in your organization necessarily is going to be like a rock star that you ultimately want to move up the organization. There might be a person who. It’s sitting there going, okay, yeah, this person is great and just being transparent with them about like, hey, either.

You think that [00:30:00] person above you is probably going to exit or move into a different role at some point, and you’re next in line for that. And we want to get you prepared for that or trying to find a way for them to pick up other responsibility within the business in the meantime. And maybe you pay them a little bit more through a stipend or something else to do that, but that elevates their position.

I think finding those roles, especially for trainers who want to grow beyond just coaching on the floor is really critical. You have to find ways in the organization that they can contribute. And I think there, from my perspective, at least, I feel like trainers want to contribute in other ways. So yeah, that’s my, the recommendation I would give.

Oh, that’s wonderful. Cause there’s a, what I’m hearing you say is there’s a big difference between, Hey trainer, I need you to post an Instagram story three times a week and Hey trainer, it looks like you want to go this direction in the business. You tell me you want to go that direction. I see the strengths in that.

Let’s look what that trajectory looks like. Here’s the things that go into that so that you can learn how to do it. Yeah. That’s not just like asking your trainers to do shit that they never really want to [00:31:00] do and not what they signed up for. It’s tying it into the vision and the why and the purpose.

Because you’re right. They do usually want to help out. And without being too blunt here, I probably one of the pivotal moments is how is that ask made? And how is it tied together? It’s not about the social media posts. It’s about the direction that they want to go. Yeah. And I think allowing people, especially who are more junior, who are people that want to grow and have ambition, like allowing them an opportunity to contribute to thought leadership in some way.

I think that’s also one of the big things about our team meeting is I’m asking questions. It may not be like I’m getting. Incredibly thought out answers. I have a lot of experience, so I’ve heard a lot of different things in business. But I do want to see how people are thinking and are they thinking in line with our business?

Are they thinking in line with the way that I want them to think in line with our goals in line with the things that I think that we’re teaching them. And that’s all a good indication to you that somebody is. Heading on the right path from a development standpoint that you want them to head on and also signals to you as a leader.

Oh, okay. This person’s thinking the way that I want them to think we need [00:32:00] to continue developing them and cultivating that so that they continue to get better. And so that they are ready. You develop that bench in your organization to be like, okay, cool. If this person leaves, I know that I have these people who could potentially step into this role.

And then I think as a leader that provides you a ton of peace of mind. To know, look, I don’t want anybody to leave because I love everybody and everybody’s really good at their jobs. But at the same time, if they did, for whatever reason, I have people on the bench who can step up. Yeah. You’re not scrambling to cover those responsibilities as much as you would be if you didn’t have people.

And that’s a big reason I had those skip levels too. It’s I have people that are important to me, but I also want to know what’s happening at the layer below me, because I want to know that those people are being developed in the right way also, and that they have a connection point with me and that they are willing and able to step into roles as I need if something were to happen in the business.

That’s huge. And it’s clearly it’s worth the, it’s worth the time and energy investment. Cause I know a lot of gym owners aren’t doing weekly one on ones with their direct network. Sometimes it’s not even a weekly team meeting [00:33:00] due to schedules, et cetera, but you’re making a point to make sure that you are skipping that level so that you’re ready for whatever may or may not come.

Exactly. Yep. That’s awesome. I like that. And what’s a question that came to me while you’re talking about having, like when it comes to team meetings, making sure that you’re asking lots of questions, giving everyone an opportunity to speak. What does that look like where it’s not just everybody talking and it took the meetings total chaos because we know we need to have an agenda.

So how do you give them those opportunities without derailing the entire time? Yeah, on the slides, everybody has, on each slide, there’s a distinct owner for who owns that slide and who needs to be talking. So if you were to like sit in one of our meetings, it actually runs really fast. It’s people know, okay, I got to talk about these metrics.

There’s a quick pause at the end in case I have any questions or my chief of staff has any questions, but then otherwise it’s moving. And I always urge the team when somebody comes on at first, it can be a little rough because they’re, they’re not quite. Up to the speed. So they’re not moving at the pace that we need them to.

And then also [00:34:00] they’re not anticipating the questions that are going to come at them. And that’s what I challenged the team is after a while, you should know what kind of questions I’m going to ask. Right. If you mentioned something like, Hey, we had five trials this week expire and we had one converted membership.

What question am I gonna ask? What I ask, Hey, what happened? The other four, right? You should be addressing that up front and be like, Hey, I, the other four are these people, this is the feedback that we got, right? Right. Otherwise I’m going to ask that question. And so it’s really like training, training your staff to be on the ball, moving and answering the questions ahead of me asking the questions.

Yeah. I suspect that comes with a little bit of like for a new team member who’s only been doing, maybe even on the team for a few weeks. So we’ve only had a couple of meetings under their belt. Yeah. Yeah. You’re willing to ruffle some feathers at the beginning. Oh yeah. They, they will feel stupid.

Unfortunately, I don’t try to make them feel stupid, but part of that is development. It’s like, Hey, and then you just have a conversation with them. That feels like, Hey, you didn’t not a bad job. I totally understand. Like you’re brand new. These are the things that I want you to be thinking about. And it’ll give you a good sense of, okay, are they taking, how are they taking that feedback?

[00:35:00] Are they taking that feedback? And then when they show up to the meeting the next week, did they do a better job? And if the answer is yes, then cool. They’re moving in the right direction. Exactly. So your team are prepared for this meeting. They’re not walking in the door, but proverbially walking in the door and setting their stuff down and be like, Hey guys, there was traffic and whatever.

Everyone’s got their shit dialed in. This is, I’ll be honest, they know that they would get trashed if that were the case. They would, what? Sorry. They would get trashed if that were the case. Like I was getting really good standards. And there’s a lesson. The reason I’m harping on this is there’s a huge lesson in here that Chris is I’m big on having productive meetings.

It’s not don’t have meetings. It’s not, everything isn’t. Could that meeting be an email? And could that email. Not exist, but the ones that you do have are mission critical and you’re making sure that everybody knows what’s expected of them and they’re being set up for success. And if they don’t reach success, that feedback is being given.

It’s not being swept under the rug. That’s right. If you’re not running, if you’re listening to this and not running team meetings or one on ones, This is your Impetus to Start and yes, it’s going to, it’s going to feel a little bit icky if you’ve been really [00:36:00] like, what’s going on? How you doing? Oh yeah, we’ll talk about whatever, whenever, when you have a really strong time structured agenda like Frameworks for Unicorns or Traction, EOS talks about.

I feel it’s talking weird at the beginning and you got to be okay to get through that. That’s true. So interestingly, I came into this conversation being like, I really want to talk about marketing. It’s been like 30 minutes on team and leadership, which is but I think there’s some magic in this. Yeah.

Your referral offer is this lovingly, but not crazy specials. Yep. Three bucks. Like it’s super easy. You do two things. Twice a year you do a special one that was what was the word you use rare and delightful rare and delightful. Yeah, and You’re really focusing on driving leads through experience And I think this is beautiful how this came about because it’s not talking about hey, what’s the copy on your ads look like?

What’s your funnel look like? What’s your lead follow up look like? I’m sure your ads are dialed in and lead follow up is dialed in but that all comes from like a healthy organization Which is where you started at the very beginning And I don’t want to, [00:37:00] I don’t want to give the impression that anyone can have three locations with a 1.

5 million run rate if they just have a team meeting. That’s not the message here, but there is something around, are we as good at operations and fulfillment as we think we are? Yeah. I think that’s honestly. My perspective is as the magic sauce. I know that there are some gyms that have grown really well because they do a really great job on marketing.

And I think that’s great. But a lot of times I find those gyms maybe drive 300 leads a month. They get 90 people into LBOs, but they lose 30 to 45 people a month. And that’s a really hard thing to keep going. And for me, my perspective is. I’m not saying that’s bad, but I prefer a situation where our execution operationally is incredibly high.

Our standards are incredibly high. Our customer experience is incredibly high. And those are the things that really drive the business, right? And it keeps our retention really high and keeps it in a place where we don’t have to drive 300 leads a month to maintain and steadily increase our business.

Yeah, and that’s absolutely huge because I suspect [00:38:00] myself and many of the listeners They came from a fitness and training background trainers term gym owners, but speaking to my experience I had precisely fuck all management training. Yeah, I Sought it out independently through BFU and that completely changed my business.

This is yeah, it’s about you but That was like a complete 180 shift that really helped me get things together and helped me be who I am. And there’s something to be said about not just what does our programming look like and sets and reps and what app do we use and how do we deliver it. It’s about the internal operations of the business.

It sounds to me like everyone knows what they’re accountable for. Yep. Barring shit goes wrong, of course, but everyone knows to show up prepared. They know how to support each other. They know what their trajectories are and what they’re working towards. So that’s more than just like, Hey, what does the exercise execution look like?

What cues do we use? It’s how do we operate as a consistent organization so that everyone knows who’s on what, so we can deliver consistency across locations. That’s it. Yeah. Just really solid execution. That’s all it comes down to. Yeah, just go be an [00:39:00] amazing executor. Yeah, there is the magic that was lost in the, for sure, they do for my LBO type.

Yeah, I agree. So we covered most of what I want to cover. I guess I’m curious on two final things as we wrap up here. Yeah. The first one is what does your job look like on a day to day basis? Day to day basis. It sounds like you’re doing a lot of one on ones. You’re working on the strategy piece, but I know there’s so many gym owners that are like, they would love to do the things that you’re doing.

But they’re just like, I don’t have the time for it. So how do you set up your broad strokes, your weeks and your months so that you have the time to develop the leaders you want? Yeah, for sure. And I think this stuff takes time too. And I still, I don’t want to make it seem like I don’t have some of the same issues that I’ve never said.

I still have to sub on the floor sometimes. Like it’s a reality, but at the same time, a lot of my job, I think as you become a bigger leader in your organization, most of your job becomes working with your team to execute. and helping them do a better job. And that ultimately helps the organization. And so I think about number one is how do we help [00:40:00] our team deliver and execute our experience better every day.

And that layers down the organization, right? So when I’m talking about chief of staff, it’s like how she deals with the facility leaders and managers all the way down to the coach level. Are we doing the things we need to be doing consistently? And are we delivering and those people getting better at what they’re doing every day, and that ultimately we can keep improving half a percent, 1 percent every day, that is tremendous benefit to the business.

The other things I’m thinking about strategically are obviously I have a marketing person that reports into me and I have a sales and member experience reports into me. We’re looking at data all the time. What’s working, what’s not working. What are the things that we need to be doing more of? What are the things that we need to be testing?

And, and that’s how I spend a lot of my time. is trying to figure out as a SSP whole, where are the places that we can be doing a little bit better based upon data and executing on those things, new ideas to test. And also looking at the entire business and saying, okay, across three locations, every location needs something a little bit different.

So how am I making sure that the central resources that we have [00:41:00] are being appropriated in the right places to be able to support the business where it needs it? Got it. Yeah. So in broad strokes, it sounds like you’re really embodying on like an organizational level, certain leadership. It’s not just, I believe in helping people.

It’s your behaviors are modeled after what do I need to do to help that person execute as well as they can. And you’ve got meetings and metrics to support that. And then in addition, like I’m sure you still have all the feels about your business sometimes when things are going crazy, but you’re making decisions based on data and metrics and you’re not afraid to experiment and just try stuff out and to not put words in your mouth.

It’s not about finding the right answer. It’s about being less wrong and willing to do it. We’ll need a trip. Yeah. You will never be trip. Right. That’s just part of running a business or working in any business. And so I think you can’t be, you can’t be afraid to experiment and some of those things just won’t work.

But I think where people fall down a little bit is that they experiment, they don’t necessarily do a. Strict enough post mortem to understand actually, actually happened here. Let’s really dive into that and understand what happened here. [00:42:00] And what nuggets can we take away from this experience? Um, did that LBO flop because it was a bad offer or did we chip the bed on conversions?

Exactly. And, and I think that analysis and thinking at a deeper level becomes really critical, especially as you scale. And, and that’s what I spent a lot of my time on. Fantastic. My final question for you. What’s next for SSP?

You’re allowed to be ambiguous if you want. I didn’t listen to any prep him in advance for this one. I’m just curious Yeah, I honestly don’t I’m I waffle a lot between, because part of that is I actually will every 18 months to two years, I’ll be like, Oh, you know what? Opening a gym. Wasn’t that bad? Like I can do this again.

No problem. Let’s go. I’m super excited about it. And I’ll find a space. I’ll sign the lease. And then about six months after I opened, I’m like, Oh my God, why did I do that to myself? That was. That was where, so that’s where I’m at right now. Like I’m still hyped up and I’m still focused on like growing the business and like [00:43:00] growing the third location, doing all that stuff.

But it’s also really hard, man. It’s really hard to open a gym and grow it and put the resources against it and scale the team and hire new people and all that stuff. And I would tell you, if you would ask me a year ago, I’d be like, Oh yeah, I’m going to get up to at least five. And then we’re going to kind of at three operating three at a really high level and having really great membership bases there and profitable businesses.

That might be okay too. And then I can like figure out where I want to spend my time, whether it be doing more coaching with BF, other things out there and other ways to contribute to the industry. I think I’m waffling between that. So I can’t give you a great answer, but that’s where I’m at right now.

I’ll take an honest answer over a great answer every day of the week. I love it. Any final thoughts as we wrap up here for any listeners that you want to add anything? I didn’t ask you that you feel would be critical. No, I think it’s, I think we covered a lot of stuff. I think in the auto and the marketing piece real quick, which is just, I don’t, again, I don’t spend a ton in, in paid advertising.

Right. I think my Google marketing budget is like 600 a month. I think we have a Google lab, but [00:44:00] it doesn’t spend a time, right. And it’s more about like awareness. And a lot of the things that we do are the things that we just normal course of business, referrals, past member activations, email marketing, like all of these things that we hit on pretty much every BFE retreat, honestly, like these are the things that we want you to focus on.

It’s like, that’s real. Seriously, like the stuff works if you just execute it really well. And so I think that’s what, I think a lot of people come to me and always ask for the proverbial magic bullet. What do you do? Like, how do we get magic growth all of a sudden? And it doesn’t happen that way. It happens incrementally.

We net grow 20 to 30 new members a month because we executed really high level. And we do all those things at a really high level. And so I think any gym owners, no matter where you start, I don’t care if you have 30 members or 130 or 300, it’s if you want to grow your business, just focus on that and really for perspective to 20 to 30 new members a month.

Sounds. Outrageously good to even gyms like me, but on a 600 member person membership base, we’re talking like 5 percent a month. Exactly. Yeah. But for a lot of gyms, if you’re at a hundred [00:45:00] clients, you’re looking to, you’re looking to add seven or eight new clients and lose two or three. Exactly. Yeah. And if you’re net adding five.

Every month in a year on average, that’s 60 new members at the end of the year. Yeah. That is the crushing it. That’s a recurring revenue business magic right there. Yeah. Crushing it. Just focus on that just incremental growth. And even in a year you will have a much different business than you did at the start of the year.

Yeah, it’s honestly no different than our fitness clients coming in being like, what’s the best exercise for my butt or my abs? A hundred percent. Yeah. And yeah, it’s like squats, deadlifts, presses, like compound multi joint things. Over and over, man. Yeah. And then we get into our businesses and we’re like, what’s the magic thing for marketing?

It’s like good fulfillment, operational efficiency, actually let our behavior show that we give a shit about our team. It’s, we need to do the same 10 exercises for fitness in our business and good things will come. That’s it. That’s where the magic happens. I think that’s a beautiful place to end it on. I want to say thank you so much for your time and giving us all a [00:46:00] peek behind the curtain and what you’re doing.

And I’m really, it used to be the answer, but it’s still really great to hear that it’s like the secret sauce is doing everything exceptionally well. Yeah, this was fun, Ben. I like having the podcast with you. This is cool. I’d be happy to do more. I’m always doing Michael and apparently I’m not terrible at asking open ended questions.

Yeah, it’s good. It’s great. Yeah. A lot of fun. Cool. Thank you for your time and I’ll see you on the next one. Sounds good. Thanks, Ben.