Increase Sign Ups and Retention by Giving Your Community a Peek Behind the Curtain

[00:00:00] Hey friends. Ben here with BFU. Welcome to another episode of The Business for Unicorns podcast. Today, Pete and I are talking about how do you let your clients and prospective clients know how good a job that you’re doing without rubbing their face in it? We know how much of a turnoff it can be when someone just self proclaims that I’m the best, come hire me.

But we put a lot of effort into what we do. We didn’t start a gym and just do it all on a whim. We’re. Passionate about our craft and wanna be masters of it, and what’s the appropriate way to sprinkle that in with your clients and prospective clients in a way that’s gonna help improve retention and get more members.

So I think you’re gonna love this one. Enjoy. 1, 2, 3, 4. Welcome to The Business for Unicorns podcast, where we help gym and studio owners create a business and a life they love. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me and the business unicorns team each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really [00:01:00] takes to level up your gym.

Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Hey friends. Welcome to another episode of the BFU podcast. Before Pete and I dive in today, I wanted to ask, have you ever wanted to peek behind the scenes of Cresty sports performance and Mark Fisher Fitness? What if you could spend a day and a half learning with Pete and Mark and me for only $149 after selling out last year’s offering?

We’re bringing back this collaboration with Perform Better, who I think you all know as the industry’s leading source of functional training equipment, and this is exclusively for gym owners, we’re looking to create more income, more impact, more freedom, and build the gym and life they love. So we’re gonna be going through some of the most important lessons we’ve learned in the combined 30 probably more years of running our gyms.

What’s working right now for the top percent, 1% of gym owners in the world. And it’s a full day on Friday, May 16th and a half day on May 17th in Warwick, Rhode Island. So we did this [00:02:00] last year. It was a ton of fun. The information plus the casual vibe was just a 10 outta 10. So I’m heavily biased, but. If you wanna come hang out and learn about running your gym, plus make some more friends in the industry.

This is, yeah, I, I, so, Pete, take issue, don’t with that pitch in some capacity, because I’ve heard you do it a couple of times in the past and you always mention CSP and MFF, but you don’t mention Lean Strong, which is a crazy, profitable operation. And so. Let’s not minimize that piece. I don’t That’s fair.

Thank you for the compliment. And I agree with you, it’s not 30 plus years. I do think it is in excess of 40 years between the three of us when you actually add up our collective years. Yeah, you’re How long have we will be? I officially cracked the deck. There you go. So we’re gonna be 18 years in less than six months.

And I know Mark’s got. 12 to 13 years in. And so yeah, we got over four decades collectively of this grind worth of [00:03:00] experience that we’re kicking out there. So I don’t know how you can own a gym for a decade and not mention it in your sales copy, Ben. Be better. Uh, thank you. Pass follow the instructions.

But yeah, we’ve been the pitch. My is we’ve been a, in. We have never had a year or even a month. That’s awesome. On the red, we have been profitable since we have been profitable since day one. There’s one exception to that, but it’s technically a balance sheet. We spent $18,000 additional than we normally do on a monthly basis, which is a lot for us last November, but it wasn’t like it was capital expenditure, so it showed up on my KPI tracker, but it doesn’t show up on a profit and loss.

But yeah, we’ve never been in the red, which has pros and cons. It means I bootstrapped it and we grew slower. But yeah, we’ve, I like how you said $18,000 excess, which is a lot for us. What gym in our little bubble wouldn’t really be stung by an [00:04:00] $18,000 overspend? You make me feel really bad about my business.

If you can be that casual, like we’ve got people around us who’d be like, whatever, it’s 18 Gs, just pay it. I crashed my Ferrari, but I’ve got six more. No, I. I guess I said that, and I’m glad you pointed that I said that because I’m qualifying. We are the smallest operation between C-S-P-M-F and Lean Strong, but I think we’re different markets, different games and yeah, 18 K is a shitload of money, but it was, uh, it was well timed and already, yeah, 18 k’s a big month for some gyms, I mean, of gross revenue not spending.

So we’ll put it all into perspective. Alright, you want me to kick us off with the topic of choice today? All right. I wanna talk about the secret sauce in our gyms and why this comes to me. I saw a Guinness advertisement where they said it takes 119 and a half seconds to pour the perfect pint and good things come to those who wait.

And the takeaway there really is that you gotta tell your audience about all the effort that went into delivering your super cool, super valuable product or service. And I [00:05:00] figured there’s a conversation in there somewhere. Where we can talk about opportunities to do that or do it better than we already are, and I know you’ve got some ideas, so I’ll let you run with it.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it’s an important question because at least from the gen pop standpoint, which is the world I live in, most clients still see trainers as like the thing they do before they get a job. I imagine as I get older and as my staff gets older, they’re gonna see it as more and more of. If you’re 50 and doing this, you must be serious about it.

But I remember when I told my parents who were both very academic masters and a PhD between the two of them that I was gonna go into owning a gym. They didn’t poo pooh it, but you could tell that we’re just like, you Sure It’s not a good call when it’s been a great call and I’m very happy. So let’s taking the lens of a lot of our clients might see this as like not a thing that’s done seriously.

’cause some of our competition is undercutting a price on Facebook marketplace or bootcamps in the park or whatever They’re like. Tell [00:06:00] someone you’re in the fitness area, they’re like, oh, you’re a trainer. You’re like, you have, you got a gym? Where do you train people? Like they don’t take it seriously.

Finding a appropriate way to share the effort and expertise that you have that this isn’t just a flyby night operation, is gonna build a lot of value. And the two I stories that come to mind, the first one is we had a client named Sunny years ago. And Sonny didn’t like something in our agreement. I can’t remember what it was.

My gm, she’s like, I think I need to escalate this conversation to you. Can you talk to Sonny? I’m like, sure. Happy to talk to Sonny and see what’s going on. I honestly can’t remember exactly what his complaint was with our agreement. ’cause ours is like pretty much be a reasonable human being. I remember on that call I told them that one of the norms in fitness is that most trainers are independent contractors, and if they’re not doing a session, they don’t get paid.

And they don’t get paid when they’re answering the email. They don’t get paid when they’re writing your program. They don’t have any additional compensation out outside of that. Not this is all about money, but it’s that, yeah, most trainers aren’t treated that good and. I shared with him that like our coaches get a stipend for off the [00:07:00] floor work.

We do continuing education work on a weekly basis. We have one-on-ones with them. We’ve got team meetings. We’ve got systems and processes behind the scenes to make sure that something does go wrong. Like we’ve got you handled. That’s why there’s a general manager. She’s not, you as the owner aren’t just hanging out there to look good, like we’re doing things that make the operation run smoothly.

And I distinctly remember Sonny being like, that’s really cool. You should use that in your marketing some easier. I didn’t know that. Yeah, no, I’m not sure that we should be like, we work really hard at this gym because who’s not gonna say they work hard? It’s like saying we do the best job in talent. Do you like, how do you define that?

The skeptic in me pokes its head up, but there is something to write. Their perception of our establishment and the things we do at our establishment are probably not the same thing. And if we haven’t. Shared our intent. There’s no way to know, no way for them to know what our intent is. And admittedly I don’t use that in our marketing.

And probably that’s ’cause I haven’t [00:08:00] found like a really, a non cheesy way to say that in like broad spectrum marketing things. But it does show up in places like, I think you actually mentioned this, that some of your social media is like behind the scenes at a staff training or an in-service. It’s, here’s a.

I don’t know how much is gonna move the needle, but like here’s a photo of a coach sitting at their laptop writing a program to just give people a peek behind the curtain so they know that, oh, they didn’t just make up that program the second I walked in the door. ’cause I worked at a gym where they did that.

And don’t get me wrong, they did good work. But that’s a lot different than being like, you know what? Gotta write this next phase for Pete. Here’s what he is working with. But that ankle thing’s been really bugging him. And I know his goal is to change a bit. He’s got that vacation coming up. Like, how do I craft the perfect program for Pete’s needs?

That’s different than, Hey Pete, let’s start with some A skips today, and we’ll take it from there. We look, I published an image on our Instagram story today of a guest lecture that we had going on in front of his opening slide, and with the hashtag brain gains for the team. And so [00:09:00] I do see value in this for sure, and I’ll tell you what I remember I ran into.

A fellow kinda, maybe even a one-time business unicorns client. Definitely someone I’ve seen at our events with his whole entire team at perform better. A couple summers back and I was like. Dude who’s running the gym and he’s like, oh, I found the greatest business hack. He’s, I unapologetically told our whole community that I’m closing the gym because I need to make sure my staff gets better and we’ll be back next Monday.

And I showed them all that I had signed the whole team up for perform better. And here we are. And he’s, you’re not gonna believe it, but people were thanking us. People were celebrating it. One, I remember he told me, he’s one of my clients, told me that he would pick up a round of drinks for the whole entire team at the Friday night social type deal because of how cool he thought it was that I was investing in this.

And it makes you realize that if we’re not telling people that we’re working hard to get [00:10:00] better outside of the lens of their training experience. To your point of how people think about the fitness industry, sometimes they’re just gonna assume we’re deliberately not getting better. Especially with the gen, like people who cater to more the gen pop, where they’re not as excited about the kind of the science of the program design as maybe my clients are who come in here looking for like the secret sauce for more velocity every single day.

And so don’t assume, yeah, they know how much you care. Sometimes you gotta actually look ’em in the eye and be like, do you realize how much we care about this? Here’s how we’re doing 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 is a comprehensive overview of all the things you need to do. To grow your gym, get more leads, more clients, importantly, [00:11:00] change more lives.

Again, find the link in the show notes where you can download your free copy at gym marketing secrets book.com and now back to the podcast. Yeah, I remember, it’s a little example. I remember, I, I used to, when I was doing almost all the things in my gym in the early innings, it was like me and maybe a part-time staff.

I was just always writing programs because we do like you, we do custom programs for everybody. And so I’m doing like a few programs every day and it was driving me bonkers. And I finally realized like, wait, I don’t actually have to do this. Nobody needs a new program 10 seconds from now. Like it’s if they do one more workout on the same program, like they’re gonna be fine.

And I started telling my clients that like, Hey, if you need a new program, the day I do a deep dive and really get in the zone to do the best possible programs I can for you is whatever Wednesday afternoon. So if you need a new program, let me know and I’ll do it on Wednesday and they’re always gonna be ready on Thursday.

And I’m not, it’s not Wednesday is the day, but that’s just when I did it and I had clients being like, Hey, I know you do programs on Wednesdays and I want a good program so you can get me that next week when you’ve got it [00:12:00] done. And just telling them that this is the way we do it, rather than they don’t like they don’t know.

To your point, and I imagine this is something you wanna double or even triple down on for the newer gyms. ’cause if you’ve been around for a while, I think most. Intelligent people can be like, we’ve been around for 18 years, you’re probably doing something right. But if you’re in your first few years of operations, there’s very little things differentiating you from the person who’s training people in the park.

They don’t know. They don’t have a clue. And if you’re early in this, we often put CSCS or whatever after our, I know, email signature, but letting them know, Hey, we’ve got a pretty important continuing education regime. We do a significant onboarding for our staff. Here’s the things that go into doing this.

Here’s how I’m getting better. Even advertising when you’re at continuing education and not just tagging, perform better, but like maybe you write an email to your clients about that. I did that when I went to the the Florida BFU retreat. Granted, I was staff at that point, but I wrote this pretty funny email about going to Florida and my mom was genuinely concerned for my safety [00:13:00] regarding alligators.

It was hilarious. That was concerned. She’s, you gotta be careful of the alligators. I’m like, mom, I’m pretty sure they’re not just like in the coffee shop, we’re gonna be fine. And I wrote an email about, I’m going to do continu education and told the funny story about my mom’s concern for alligators. And I had a ton of clients who were like, Hey, how was that thing in Florida?

What did you learn? And like, again, we’re not rubbing their face in it to be like, I am the smartest, I am the like, it’s not that. It’s just, hey, we’re doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes to make sure that when you’re spending the limited time you are in a week. In our gym. We’re trying to get you the maximum benefit in that time.

Here’s how we do. Yeah. Do you want them to be able to justify their spend, that you are not a cheap service. I’m relatively familiar with their price points. You’re not giving it away, and there’s gotta be something more than We keep this place really clean in justifying that investment that they’re making.

Although I’m sure strong is immaculate, I. It’s pretty. We’re in a, we’re in a shitty old building. We gotta work hard to keep the dust. Old buildings, let’s be honest, you got me to thinking of [00:14:00] something that I think is very fascinating, which is the new gyms, the, maybe the people that you’re mentioning who put CSES after their name and like they’re just trying to stack credibility, make sure people take them seriously.

I think that deep down they introduce way more complexity than they need to. Because they’re trying to do what we’re talking about, justify their price points and seem like they’re super intelligent. And then us older gyms. They assume that we integrate this massive degree of complex programming strategy and our assessments are crazy and everybody’s on force plates and there’s markerless technology and like everyone’s like doing like assessments in their underwear with like balls all like little white ping pong balls all over their body and stuff like that.

But the reality is the longer we go in this. The less complexity we have, we strip it way down to almost nothing. And we are presumed to be really complex. Yeah. The other people are like, look over here. Look how complex we are when all they really need is the basics. [00:15:00] Like just some free weights, get in here and move around.

Just show up and you’re gonna get good results. And it’s just funny that there’s this like intersection of assumed nuance that we don’t even bother prioritizing anymore. ’cause we’re just going meat and potatoes over here in the old place. We’re getting credit for something we’re not chasing, while the other people are way overdoing it and not getting any credit for it, and it’s just this unfortunate chain of events.

Yeah. If you’re waving from the rooftops that you’ve got the best possible deal and everybody needs to come in, as I see this with like mattress stores. It’s best mattress prices ever. Discount mattress, you gotta come in now, it’s gonna be gone. It’s, I don’t know, maybe I’m just a skeptic, but it does bring up the like.

But is it though, and I trust less because of that, rather than the person who’s, yeah, we’ve got a really stringent program design process and we’re evaluating it every six months to make it better. I. That sounds legit. Not I’m willing to pay a little bit extra. There’s a rug store that has been going out of business since I passed it as a kid, and their best prices in [00:16:00] town signed.

There was a time there from between when I was like eight and 11 years old on the way to the Boston Garden where I would think, dad, we should stop and get a carpet. Those sales look crazy good, and they’re still having that going on of business sales to sign. Now, there was a gym in our market that always listed themselves as.

Strongest gym in and they, they’d list like the region sometimes or the town they were in or the neighborhood they were in, and it always drove me nuts. It’s if you’re declaring yourself to be the best or strongest at anything as the owners and it’s not your clients doing it, then enough of that, I don’t need to hear that.

Let your clients sing your praises and otherwise that’s not social proof. These like declarations of self-worth. That’s my little rant. No, put that in your SEO and meta tags and all the stuff that I’m not an expert at and hire out. But yeah, that’s not your We’re the best, is not a good, it’s not as powerful as actually like giving a really succinct one or two liner about here’s [00:17:00] the effort we put into making sure you’re getting Yeah, we’re the best.

Trust us. Bring money.

Yeah, exactly. So do we wanna leave it with an example or a thought on how we might be able to do this even better in the future? I know we’re gonna, we’re coming up on a hard stop clockwise, I would say. I think that there could be some value in our efforts to allow people to peek behind the curtain a little bit in my gym’s assessment and maybe program design process.

In fact, we have a very well received intern education piece that my business partner John does is where he writes programming in real time in front of our interns for an athlete that they collectively all know. That’s cool and he’ll, and he, this just happened, I think I might’ve told this story in the podcast once or twice where he was supposed to do an in-service for them.

A kid showed up and was like, where’s my program? And John was like, oh shit, I forgot I had to write that program. And he looked at the interns and he was like, guys, [00:18:00] you’re the odd man out here. I gotta write that program. And one of ’em was like, can we watch? And he’s like, guess so. And he AirPlayed his computer screen to the monitor, like 60 inch TV in the staff lounge.

And he was like, if you have questions, speak up. Otherwise I’m gonna crank through this. And they were like, they’re watching him type in real time and writing these exercise pairings and these progressions, and they’re like, can I ask a question? And he is like, hell yeah. Go and head still down. They’d ask a question, he’d steady steam of stream of thought, say what he was doing, and then onto the next thing.

And interns are sitting there like taking notes as fast as they can, and he’s just cranking out a program. It finishes. And I remember he was like, guys, I’m so sorry about that. I didn’t mean to waste your time. I know that I promised you X curriculum and you got this. And one of the interns raised their hands and they were like, if I could watch you do that every single day of the internship, this would be the best internship I ever had.

And he is like, that was awesome. Do more of that. That’s the best programming education I’ve gotten a while. [00:19:00] Do it. And so if it was that exciting to them, maybe her clients could benefit from it. And it more. Micro version, not quite so nuanced. That’s, yeah. Even I’m like, I’m curious at John Rights programs, like yeah, that would be, that would be good marketing, like internally to reinforce and retain, retain the clients who are currently there.

But it would also pretty cool from like a, and again, a nuanced, appropriate way for people who are got low hanging fruit who are maybe on the fence and they see some of this, it’s like, all right, those people like, yeah, they’re not just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Exactly. Yeah. I’m thinking for my gym, there was a time when I used to do consultations or strategy sessions in my gym.

Again, we get a lot of people with aches and pains. Typically gen pop, most of those aches and pains are usually doodle an old injury or just being sedentary for a decade or some weird combination of both. And I would draw out the joint by joint approach for them on the whiteboard and in layman’s terms, explain the alternating needs of mobility and stability.

And I’m [00:20:00] not, I wanna be clear, I’m not toting that this is the ultimate thing that you should do in your sales conversation. But when they’re like, yeah, my knee hurts, like how? What do we do about that? Or maybe that’s not what they ask, but that’s what they’re really asking. Explaining to them, here’s what we do and here’s how we look at the joints above and below.

And we’re gonna see that in our movement assessment a little bit. It’s like you can just see the eyes go wide. Now that didn’t work for everybody. Some people are like, I don’t give a shit. Sign me up. But for the people who are interested and wanna know the why, even if they don’t truly wanna know the real why, they just wanna get like a peek behind the curtain and a bit of a flavor.

Taking a few minutes to explain that at opportune times. Like it helps build that credibility and expertise and differentiates us from the trainer in the park. ’cause our clients don’t know what A-C-S-C-S is. They’re like, you got a cert, right? Yeah. But you can get a cert on a Groupon where I live. And that’s just a way to be like, here’s another way we’re doing it better.

And maybe they mentioned that to a friend, or they now are less frustrated when their knee pain isn’t gone instantaneously after joining. But they can start to see the process. That’s the thing where just like a little [00:21:00] sprinkle of that in, in addition to maybe some social media posts or emails about ConEd, would be a long way of educating our clients on how to be good clients.

Because we’re frustrated when they’re mad at instantaneous results. But I’m questioning how good a job we do at setting expectations about those. Yeah. The newsletter that got the most opens and forwards from our last six months was one where John emailed the parents of our high school community about.

I wanna say six to eight weeks out from the start of the season where he answered a question that he’d been asked in the gym, but not by parents directly, and he just said, you’re probably asking yourself how the programming changes as we approach the season. These are the three biggest changes you’ll see.

And they were just simple. He just, he’s probably asking yourself about how the volume changes. You’re probably asking yourself if we do any more running as we get closer and closer to tryouts. And he just, he basically was like, what are the frequently asked questions? I’m gonna write an email on that.

And he let them a little bit behind the scenes on how he [00:22:00] thinks about program design for people who are in the home stretch of a productive off season. So share the secret sauce. Perfect. Yeah, so I think the action step here is if you’re not advertising in a appropriate way how you’re, how good a job you’re doing, do a couple social media posts when you’re writing programs or doing an in-service.

Do an email to your staff next time you’re coming to going to a continued education event such as Perform Better Masterclass. That wasn’t a plan, but that would actually be a great one. And yeah, just give your community a peek behind the scenes at how much and how much you care without rubbing their face.

I like it. Let’s leave it there. Thanks for your time, sir, as yours. Always talk soon. See ya.

Get up. Get [00:23:00] up.