How Drew Generated 126 Leads in a Single Month

[00:00:00] Hey there, Ben here from BFU, and today I have the pleasure of chatting with Drew Skaggs, owner of The Shop Fitness and Performance in Oregon. And how he generated 126 leads from mostly doing events this month. So we’ve got some great tips for you on how to find groups to get your events to happen that you don’t have to do all the legwork, how to market those events, how to present offers to those events.

And we get into a little bit of reactivating former members with segment to your email list. So I know you’re going to love this one. Let’s dive in.

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, 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.[00:01:00]

Hey friends, Ben here with Business for Unicorns. And today I bring you a very special episode with Drew Skaggs, owner of The Shop Fitness and Performance in Oregon. He generated 126 leads last month. And we’re going to dive into how he did that. So you can steal the secrets. But before we dive in, I just wanted to give you, remind you that we have a new free tool on our website that we just put up because we know how hard it is on the topic of generating leads to find a compelling offers to get more leads and more members in your business.

So we’ve got, we’ve put together an entire document of our best converting offers as a PDF that you can go grab right now. Just click below in the show notes and it’s yours for free. No strings attached. All right, Drew, let’s dive in. So 126 leads. Where do you want to begin? Let’s dive in. That is a record for us.

I was very pleased with the performance that month, but we did a couple of new things and some of them are ongoing. So I’m excited to see how this trend continues. Why don’t we start [00:02:00] with a couple of new things you did. Tell us about what did you do? What were the things, but also how did you. Do the smart things you did to get all the leads out of it.

So we had three events in the month of October. Two of them were with a group called charge. That’s a women in health and fitness group. That’s on campus at Oregon state university. So we are in a college town and we had experience with them from back in April and a good experience. They reached out to us again at the start of this school year to schedule some events for their members and 60 of our leads.

Came just from that group and after our two events we did, we hosted two workouts for them during the week and we signed up a handful of members and have all the rest as leads to continue nurturing. Nice. So what, so you did an event for charge and then you also followed it up with a workout. Tell us a little more about what was the event for events.

The event [00:03:00] was the workout. Yeah. Oh, okay. That makes sense. Yeah, because they are a women in health and fitness. So the purpose of the group is to introduce their members to local gyms or studios or other types of fitness so that they can get exposed to different types. And then for the most part, they end up joining one or more of those studios.

Oh, I see. So if I understand you correctly, CHARGE would have different studios host different events to expose women. Women in health and fitness to what the options are like and educate them and give them an experience. And you were one of the gyms they’d rotate around, but they loved you so much. They invited you back.

Exactly. So that, that first event happened back in April and we were apparently the most requested one for this year. So we were the first one. And because we had, we didn’t want to jam too many people into the gym to compromise the experience. So they asked if we could do back to back nights. So we divided the group up and we had two different [00:04:00] evenings with Approximately 24 people in attendance plus a handful of people that each time plus a handful of people that couldn’t make it who were continuing to email and nurture.

That’s fantastic. Congratulations. So I’m curious, like doing events, whether it’s with charge or charity workout or what have you, isn’t necessarily like a new thing for gyms. These are pretty common. So I’m curious. Did you do anything special or any tips to make sure that like you captured everybody as a lead?

Did you follow up with an offer? Tell us about the process to do that because I know some people run a charity workout And they raise lots of money, but they didn’t really get any clients out of it. It sounds like you. And the opposite had really good success. Yeah, for sure. I think the simplest thing that we did was when it came to register for the event, we sent out a quick and easy signup link and it was free for people to attend.

And so that way they submitted name, phone, email, and it wasn’t reliant on them [00:05:00] contacting us or doing anything like that to get registered. So when it came to collecting information. As simple as possible. Uh, and you took ownership of that collection process. It wasn’t like, oh, we’ll see how many people come and get them to write their name on a sheet of paper.

You did this all in advance with your systems. For sure. And it was done in PushPress. We added an event. They, our system, PushPress collected the name, phone, email. We had a capacity limit that we had broadcast to the charge group. So they knew that spots were limited. So they were motivated to reserve that spot.

And then leading up to the event, we sent out a couple of emails talking about things like parking, what to wear, because we were in that transition period weather wise, where if it was cool, we might have the doors open. If it was cold, we would have the doors closed. And so that way we could communicate with them in advance.

And then we did have an offer for them. At the end of their workout on both nights. What was the offer and how did you deliver it? [00:06:00] The offer was at the end of their workout, we just recapped everything we did. And we talked about what our programming and workouts look like. And then we offer a student discount.

And if they were to sign up by noon, the following day, they would get 50 bucks off their first payment. Of their membership. So a pretty significant discount. Yeah, that’s huge. So it sounds like rough recap is you controlled the signup process into your own systems. You weren’t reliant on the other group because we know that the group may or may not be as organized as you are.

Exactly. Then you made sure to warm them up, so to speak, of what to expect. Here’s what’s going to happen to remove any hesitations or barriers people might feel coming into it. Cause again, we know sometimes you run events and the show rate can be dismal, especially for a free thing. It sounds like you.

Made them feel comfortable so they all wanted to show up and then last but not least you made an offer at the end of The workout in person that was time sensitive for a pretty good deal I also want to point out that offer and it’s in a good way. Like it’s not [00:07:00] revolutionary. It’s 50 bucks off It’s super simple.

You didn’t make a new thing. You didn’t Do anything crazy. It wasn’t like your first month as a dollar. Like this is like reasonable savings. Exactly. And just by Getting a handful of signups even with that significant discount. We’ve already Had a few coaches assisting me on those nights, but we’ve more than recouped any sort of expense that was involved with the process Yeah, yeah, 50 bucks off.

We’ll happily give everyone 50 bucks off their first month Knowing they’ll probably continue. Yeah, it was a no brainer. And then following that, we announced that offer that night in person. I sent a follow up email immediately after everyone left, and then I had a follow up email the next morning because that offer was expiring at noon.

So you really hit them hard on that, in like a good way, because I know some gym owners, myself included, at a period of time was like, Hey, Drew, if you’re just signing up, like we’d love to have it, like no pressure. We don’t want to sell you. And you hit them three times over a 24, [00:08:00] less than 24 hour period.

Yes, exactly. And then, and actually four times, because after the offer expired, I sent a follow up and said something. If you weren’t able to make it to the event, here’s a free class for you to redeem at any time. And by the way, if you enjoyed your experience, here’s a link to leave us a Google review. So.

And how many Google reviews to get out of it? We got two. Yeah, I wanted more. Two is great for people who are, let’s be real. Not a diehard of your business. They’re just here to experience the thing. Yeah. That was a one time visit for most of those people. So you got a whole bunch of leads that are in your database to become, so they’ll get, Offers as time goes on.

So you might get more of them on black Friday or new year’s, et cetera. You’ve added a bunch of leads. You also got a handful of clients out of it. And for the people who didn’t do either, or might’ve done some of them, you also got good reviews out of it. You basically triple dipped with this. Exactly.

That’s beautiful. Well done. So I’d like to go [00:09:00] back to, you did this charge event in April. I’m curious. It’s something that strikes me as really clever that you’ve done is go to a group of people who are already potentially interested in this versus doing something like a charity bootcamp is obviously a great opportunity, but you’ve got then got to market it.

You’ve got to get people into it. You’ve got to do all the logistics. You’ve got to manage the project, so to speak. How did you find out about charge in the first place? Cause this seems like a kind of a goldmine way to do it rather than it saved you a lot of legwork. They already had the people. You just need to host an event.

That’s For sure. And to be perfectly clear, they reached out to me earlier this year when we did the very first event. And so I was initially skeptical because it, I didn’t know what to expect from the group or how it was going to operate. And so I was hesitant, a little bit skeptical to even schedule an event.

And then one of my coaches back then was also a, she was finishing up her degree at the time. So she actually knew some of the people. She helped me coach that [00:10:00] first event. so much. And we had such a great experience. What I realized is that we were also doing the organizers a favor. They have to fill their calendar with, with gyms or studios to host these events.

That’s the entire purpose of their group. And by offering them time slots or multiple time slots, we’re making their life easier. And then when it comes time to promote, they’re going to gladly shout our name. In fact, one of the directors of that group has been a member with us for, since that first event.

That’s amazing. So yeah, that’s, there’s a really good pro tip here, listeners, that it’s, you don’t necessarily need to create the play and run the play. You might be able to do, I don’t know if charge is in multiple cities. I’ve never heard of it where I am in Southern Ontario, but you can do a bit of research and leverage your network, including your trainers like Drew’s done and see what other groups are there out there that you not having to do the legwork is actually a huge favor to the organizers.

And that could be schools, charitable organizations, there’s, there’s all sorts [00:11:00] of opportunities there where it would end up being a win rather than a loss. Hey, we want to do this thing. We got to pick a date. We’ve got to do all the marketing. We’ve got to get enough people in to make it worth our while.

There’s a lot of, a lot of wins in there by you working with this group. It sounds like more wins to come too. I think so because they also, they just asked me after this most recent couple of events to be like a, A referral for them for other businesses. So when they contact other gyms, they have a little blurb from me about how great and easy the process was, how much fun it was.

And so while hopefully that helps them book more events, I think what it also is going to. make them realize is that if they hit any resistance anywhere else or any reluctance to sign up, they know they can just come back to me and bring me more people. So yeah, I imagine you’d happily do this once a quarter.

Awesome. Anything else to share about the events since I caught you about half your leads last month? Um, nothing on those events, but what I already did for this month [00:12:00] was I’m basically just going to rerun that play. Just with a different group. So I contacted our Chamber of Commerce and I have an event scheduled with any member of the Chamber of Commerce coming up in about two weeks.

Same option? They come in for a free workout and you just run the exact same play? Pretty much. The offer is going to be different because we had a student membership versus, say, a regular LBO or something like that for anybody that’s not a student. Yeah, that makes sense. But again, same thing. You’ve kept it simple.

Slightly different offer. Pretty much everything about the play is going to be the same otherwise. That’s awesome. I’m excited to hear about the results of that. Where did the other half year leads come from? We’ve got 126 leads. Roughly 60 were from the charge events. 60 on its own is a great number for a month.

126 is outrageous. Where did the delta come from? Some of those were just our normal lead flow, whether it comes from our, you know, Google ads or website and SEO stuff, some referrals that accounts for a chunk of the remaining ones. [00:13:00] But I also started the Jim growth blast off the program with Mark. And the very first couple of assignments were email marketing related.

So reaching back out to cold leads or X members or things like that. Ghosties and freshies as I believe he calls them. And so we made an offer. We sent out emails. I did all of the segmenting in our. And we sent out an offer to various groups and we had some hits. I think we ended up signing, signing up eight people on that LBO in October.

Fantastic. That’s huge. And for the people who aren’t familiar with Blastoff, and this, this isn’t intended to be a sales pitch for Blastoff, but tell us a little bit more about what you did to segment the list and what those offers look like. Cause that’s something that a lot of gym owners, once somebody left, they, you know, We do nothing and wait for them to contact us again.

And you had such great success with this. And I also want to point out, you’re not like a new gym and you’re not like, you’ve got chops and it’s still worked really well [00:14:00] for you. So give us a little more insight of what you did and how that worked. Yeah, for sure. First, the, the importance of maintaining a, a segmented list was really hammered home for me.

Initially in that, in that group, the assignment was to. and you have your cold leads, you have your warm leads, you have your ex members, your current members, things like that. Cause obviously you don’t want to send the wrong message to the wrong group. So that, that part was a little bit daunting and it got to the point where I had my current members, I had my warm leads.

Cause those are obviously say the first two weeks of Reaching out to us. And then I just applied coldly to everybody else because if I waited for it to be perfect, then I would still be working on it. And obviously that wasn’t going to serve me or serve anybody else. So we had for the cold leads and for the X members, it was a similar LBO, but just framed a little differently.

So for cold leads, we offered them. A new way to get [00:15:00] started, which was a two week unlimited pass for 49 bucks. And so these were people who maybe tried our free class, which is one of our options, or maybe contacted us, but we never got them in the door or something like that. Then for the X members, it was the same LBO, two weeks of training for just 49 bucks unlimited.

But we basically framed it as we, we miss you. We’d love to have you back. Even if you just want to. train with us for these two weeks. That’s great. We also know that, or we hope that some of you will stick around for a little bit after that. It’s beautiful. You’ve hit a couple of really important points here.

One of which is like segmenting your list can be daunting, especially if you haven’t done it from day one, there’s no. That was a lot of admin work to go through emails, put people in the right list, make sure it’s not, you’re not the wrong people aren’t getting the wrong message because even though us and our listeners know that that email marketing is a thing and most of our clients probably know that as well, a well written email reads [00:16:00] like it’s having a conversation with one people.

And if you’re saying, Hey, we’d love to have you back, but it’s actually a lead who’s never joined you before. It’s probably going to turn them off and it comes across as spam. So point number one is just because it’s daunting and administratively heavy doesn’t mean it’s not worth it in the long run.

Like. Eight new members from that is worth a few hours of segment to your list. And the second thing you’ve mentioned that’s really important as well is your offers aren’t crazy different. And this is something that we talk about in Unicorn Society a lot, but like you just changed the wrapping paper, your former members and your unconverted leads both got two weeks.

It was just how it was packaged. And the example I use for this is like Alex Hormozy’s hundred million dollar offers. It’s all about the wrapping paper. The jewelry store doesn’t make new diamonds because it’s Christmas. It’s just on sale for Christmas, so it’s a Christmas deal, but it’s the same diamonds for Christmas, or Boxing Day, or Valentine’s Day, or Easter, or Summer Break, or, I don’t know, I don’t know the jewelry store, I don’t know what all the promotions are.

But you’ve done a really good job [00:17:00] keeping your offers really simple, and just tweaking them for the audience, rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Who do I sell them to? Because for a lot of these people, it feels, it probably feels to you like you’re selling two weeks for 49 all the time, but to those different groups, that’s the first time they’ve heard it from you probably.

So it’s new to them, even though it’s old to you. Exactly. We’ve never offered it exactly like that. So it was brand new to everybody that received it. Beautiful. It’s a, again, you’ve kept it so simple. Yeah. And then big takeaway for me was we updated some of our SOPs. So whether it was a new lead or somebody on the LBO or converting into a membership or canceling a membership, we now have a step in our SOP to update the tags in our CRM.

That way it’s typically one or two at a time when that’s happening, as opposed to thousands that you have to sort through if you do it as like a one time thing. Yes, I have a very valuable pro tip. Once you [00:18:00] segment your list, keep it maintained. You don’t want to, you don’t maintain your house once a decade, because then you’ve got a lot of problems to deal with.

It’s much easier to just, you know, cut your grass every week. This is the same applies. Anything else that you want to hit on in terms of success this past month that I haven’t asked in terms of your lead gen and conversions? I don’t think so. My biggest takeaway is that even if I may not have say an event with a charge group until say the next school term or something like that, I can just hit it, hit up other groups.

I’m sure there’s plenty of other groups out there that I haven’t even identified yet. That would, who doesn’t love a free offer? Yeah, a hundred percent. And if nothing else, there’s something to be said for, Even if you’re not getting the same type of conversion that you did, because I do want to say your results seem significantly above average, which isn’t a surprise knowing you, but even if you’re running an event and it’s not a slam dunk, that’s still 10 or 20 more people who have good things to say about your gym.

You never know when that person’s like, you know what, this person’s a little far from me. I came for the free worker. It was awesome. I’m not gonna drive there three days a [00:19:00] week. Who knows when they’re gonna tell a friend who moves to town or somebody else that they get lunch with. It’s just more people speaking about good things about your gym.

For sure. And then with everybody, whether they signed up or not, they’re now in my contact list and with help from Mark and the Jim growth blast off, I’m continuing my weekly pulse of email marketing. In fact, I just sent one out before I hopped on this video. Beautiful. So hopefully that one keeps paying dividends.

Absolutely. There was a period, especially with the, it was like reels and tick tock and all the main social media platforms prioritizing the same content where it was like social media is the game. And email marketing isn’t necessarily the sexiest thing anymore because it’s not new and shiny and attractive.

But if you’re consistent with your list, it’s not uncommon to be getting a few signups a month from sending one content based email a week with periodic harder sales at opportune times, such as Black Friday or Boxing Day would be ones that come to mind for this time of year. All right, so let’s do a recap.

So in [00:20:00] terms of running the events, one, try to find local groups where them coming to you would actually be doing a favor for them. You can still organize your own things, but why not leverage a group of. Already 20 people rather than you having to find 20 individual people to once you do that, make sure that you control the process, get them to sign up with your systems and your software rather than leaving it on the group.

Um, one is from your experience. It sounds like it makes it a lighter lift for them and they’re going to appreciate you from that, but two, it makes it easy for you to control the messaging and the delivery and make sure that this is. I’ll win for all parties. Three, run a kick ass event. I know we didn’t talk about that too much, but I’m just going to assume that if you listen to this podcast, the fulfillment of fitness services is something that’s a strength and passion of yours, so do your thing.

And then lastly, make sure that you hit them with an offer. Like as Drew did, that’s in person at the end of the event, a follow up email afterwards. A follow up email to let them know it’s closing soon in the morning and a follow up email after it closes about if you didn’t get it, we’re [00:21:00] unable to come to try to get a couple more people out of it that they can still benefit.

Did I hit all the points in terms of the events? I think that’s pretty much it and, and you’re right. We didn’t talk about the quality of the event, but if, if people don’t have a good time and they don’t enjoy the workout or whatever type of event it is you’re doing, then the offer doesn’t matter. Yeah.

It should be a mixture of great quality training, but also a lot of fun. The goal isn’t to, uh, Change their fitness life in that one workout. It’s to get them excited about a thing that could change their life for sure. And then when it comes to the work you’ve been doing with blast off, yeah, sometimes you got to do the crappy stuff like segmenting your list, but once it’s in place, you can keep your offers relatively simple.

Like you’re probably gonna be able to keep offering two weeks for 49 ish dollars. You can hit your previous, you’re on converted leads with that every three months. No problem. So segment your list, make sure you email your list regularly, and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to offers.

Two Weeks Unlimited is the, our go to right now with Unicorn Society. Uh, the price point can vary, but it’s enough that it feels like a [00:22:00] really good deal because it is, but it also Unlimited is really nice because then people can come enough times that they start to see the value from it. I think often we’re, I mean, speaking for myself, I was stingy with offers before.

I’m like, I don’t want to give them too much for free. It devalues my service and. There’s something to be said for being able to like, not just try before you buy, but get to experience the difference before you buy, which sounds like you’ve done really well. Exactly. Perfect. Anything else you want to add?

I don’t think so. I think we covered it all. Perfect. I just want to say congratulations again. So great to hear about the success, like lots of leads, lots of conversions. You’ve got land Google reviews. You’ve got the best of all worlds. So thanks for being on the podcast and listeners, if you’re interested in some offers like Drew’s been doing, Download our list of best converting offers in the show notes.

It’s yours for free. No strings attached that you can get more people in your gym, change more lives, make more money. Thanks Drew. Thanks for having [00:23:00] me.