Future of Fitness: Our Manifesto for a Better Industry with Mark Fisher

[00:00:00] 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 takes to level up your gym.

Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.[00:00:30]

Yeah.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Gym Subs. Gym subs helps gyms and fitness facilities grow supplemental revenue with premium products, private label options, and simple. Done for you retail systems with no minimum orders and high profit margins. They also provide education and support tools to make supplement sales easier for [00:01:00] your team.

To learn more, visit gym subs.com. Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business Unicorns podcast, Mr. Fisher, how’s your week going? That’s great. Now they can hear Pippin. Yelping in the background. Yeah. Enthusiasm. I tried to wait, I’m not sure if y’all are gonna hear it or not, but my Pup Pippin was really excited to start today’s podcast.

I can, yeah. And he’s loud as fuck. How’s your week been otherwise, sir? It’s been good and was upstate. Had a little bachelor [00:01:30] party for a friend of mine and misbehaving. Middle-aged dads are wanted to do nice. It was good. It was fun. It was costly on sleep, as those things always are, but I feel like for me, I found the right balance of showing up as a friend, but also being willing to be like.

I’m gonna bed everybody. I don’t care. It’s time. I Dad’s done. Nice. Nice. Good for you. Good for you. Yeah. We’re recording this on a Tuesday, so I just, I’m still, still have the weekend on my mind. And this weekend I had a, also just had a really good social weekend, few friends staying over our house. Plus I spent some [00:02:00] good quality time on schoolwork, which feels productive.

Nice. And maybe one day I won’t be a student anymore. Someday one day. Let’s dive in and let’s, we’re gonna talk about a topic that is a little bit of a tangent in that it’s like we’re not talking about gym operations as much today. We’re talking about a project that we took on recently for business unicorns, in which we wrote a manifesto for what we hope that our impact can be both on.

The clients we work with and the industry at large. And so we wanna just share that. For those of you who are on our [00:02:30] email list, who might have seen it recently or not, we’re gonna link to it down below, of course. But we wanna just go through like why we decided to write this thing, what’s in it that we hope that maybe you’ll vibe with?

And then maybe how it applies to you listeners, whether it’s something that you would maybe wanna do in your business or not. We can unpack our, our different opinions about that. But maybe start, maybe Fisher, do you wanna talk a little bit about what brought us to write this thing in the first place?

There were sort of two things that happened concurrently. Had something, an idea for a piece for a [00:03:00] while to try to articulate what we think biz Unicorns stands for. And then sometime it had been on my list for a while, taking a stab at that. And then I think it was probably like in November, you wrote a kind of a stream of conscious put in the slack with me and Ben and Pete, and essentially were like, I think we should consider.

Now that we’re getting more and more eyeballs on us, if there are eyeballs on us and our influence seems to be growing and our impact is [00:03:30] potentially growing, how might we want to steer the ship of the industry? And perhaps it’d be valuable for us to articulate for ourselves and to anybody that is interested in what we think.

What we see is the opportunities to make the fitness industry a better place, and that was how it was born. I think the other thing that is worth noting is it all we have sent out in the email, Rosemary presumably will put a link to it here in this podcast. Clearly it’s something we’re happy to talk about externally and.

The main thrust of this was not [00:04:00] really as like a marketing document. Yeah. And we’ll probably talk a little bit about, certainly some of my own reservations about this kind of document often seeming quite self-important and navel gazing. So it, this is less about marketing per se, that certainly, of course there will be tangential benefit.

I think people will read it and you’ll be like, oh, that’s me. I believe that too. But I think more so for ourselves to just continue to engage in a process of what is the best version of the fitness industry, what are the things that we think. We’d like to be different. What do we see as the opportunities and what might it look like [00:04:30] if we moved in what we think would be a good direction going forward?

So I think that tees us up. Yeah, I think you’re right. That’s a really good summary, and I’ll just add this, and we’ve talked about this before in the podcast, that in part because of my nonprofit background, and in part because we both are socially conscious creatures, even we started Mark Fisher Fitness.

Some of our first meetings were about what’s our mission, what’s our vision? What do we exist to do? As laughable as it was to start a gym with that conversation, I think it in many ways has served us well because we continue to [00:05:00] attract. People that wanna work with us. Yeah. In part because we have a social conscious conscience and we care about the world and the impact we’re making.

And I do think that people have a different expectations of businesses they interact with, especially kinda small mom and poppish, businesses like ours or pop and poppish businesses like ours, that they want their business to stand for something. In some cases. And I think for ours, there’s some portion of our followership, I think.

Does work with us because they get a sense of our integrity, our [00:05:30] character, our intentions to make the world a better place. And so I, I think putting out this manifesto while you’re right, not exactly intended for only marketing purposes, is a way for us to get clear about what do we stand for, where are we heading, where do we hope to take all of you with us?

And how, what do we all need to do to make this industry and maybe impart corner of the world the version that we want it to be? And so it’s lofty. For sure it’s Naval gey for sure, but I think it also done right and I hope, I think we’ve done it pretty well, [00:06:00] starts to let people out there know who are following us and paying attention that that.

We’re a fit, right? Yeah. That, that we maybe see the world in some similar ways and we want some similar things from the world, which means we should work together to make that happen. Yeah. And so I’m hoping this will serve as a little bit of a call to action for people who weren’t sure if we were the right fit for them to say, oh look, actually, their vision of what they’re trying to do here for their clients and the industry really matches with mine.

Mm-hmm. And so I’m hoping we find some new people in the world because of it. [00:06:30] Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s right. And two other quick comments and maybe we can explain a little bit about our process briefly before we get into the meat of what we think the world should the fitness industry should be. The first is, I don’t think any of this is gonna be like shocking, particularly to anybody, frankly.

If anything we maybe could have if we had a different sense of ability and different set of values, maybe thrown stones more aggressively and try to be the more controversial and hot takey. But ultimately this the final document because I think we want to be aspirational. Not intentionally divisive.

It’s not a document that’s [00:07:00] probably gonna shock people. Right. So that’s probably the first thing. Yeah. When we first started talking about our thinking was. We imagine it’s probably pretty clear to a lot of other people and maybe even to ourself. When I think about a lot of this cultural stuff, at its best, a lot of times you’re just trying to create words around what’s happening.

You’re trying to be explicit, to create more clarity, to find if there are places where any differences need to be ironed out and really make a thousand percent sure everyone is exactly on the same page because it’s so clear, right? So again. If you read this, [00:07:30] I don’t think you’re gonna be like, what the, they care about that.

That’s fascinating. And the other thing I’ll say is we are the, listen, the email list has grown very dramatically. I’m certainly spending a lot more of my time hanging out with vendors, with operators in more health clubs or big box gyms or other parts of the industry. And that is a little bit different from us, right?

Because for a long time we’ve stayed in a little bit of the silo of. The quote unquote training gym or the group strength training gym. Often the world [00:08:00] of other CrossFits or personal trainers turn gym owners, and that’s still the milieu we live in, and that’s where most of our clients come from, of course.

But because it is feeling more and more that we’re having the opportunity to get a little bit of platform on a larger stage that I think is a part of the larger fitness industry, and certainly it’s part of my. Mission of late to make sure that our silo connects with the rest of the industry. Then it made even more important, I think, to be clear around like, this is who we are.

This is what we care about. This is what we believe. And this is where we would like to see things go. Yeah, [00:08:30] I’ll pull up there. But yeah, that’s two other things that strength. I think that’s it. I think, uh, one tiny little footnote I wanna share is people also forget, and I often forget how young this industry is, when we talk about like the professional fitness industry, we’re talking about a handful of decades, my friends, it is not been around for that long as an established career or business model.

And I, I think one of the reasons I felt emboldened enough to really. Put a flag down to say, this is what we stand for and this is the impact we wanna make on the industry, is I think the industry is still [00:09:00] ripe for crafting, right? I think this industry is still young enough that it needs people who are interested in helping mold it in a direction that’s gonna be better for everyone.

Yeah. And I’m sure part of it’s hubris, but I think we have enough experience at this point to know what, at least our section of the industry. Could look like if it improves. Yeah, and I just felt the industry as a whole, I think probably needs more people to stand up and advocate on its behalf. Yes, as has been noted.

Uh, by observers, you and I are not lacking in certain amount of [00:09:30] confidence. Yes. And this document is perhaps reflective of it, so let’s go through them. We basically came up with basically five pillars that we rep that we think represent a core problem we see, but then also we try to outline here kind of very, in broad strokes, the direction we’re working mm-hmm.

To what we think improvement might look like. And then each one of these comes with an invitation. So we won’t go through all in tremendous detail, but let’s start with the first one. The headline in this one is. Coach humans, not just bodies coach humans, not [00:10:00] just bodies. Yeah. So do you wanna just talk through about what this pillar means to us?

Yeah. It’s interesting When I think about the five opportunities, I think is I also wanna set the frame for me. I am navigating some real complexity. In that, the fourth and the fifth, there’s a real tension there. And I’m not sure honestly how we square those practically. The first three to me sure. Just seem like painfully obvious and like net, like it’s so obvious what would need to happen here.

And it’s just like net [00:10:30] winning for everybody. And listen, the fitness industry is about fitness, which is largely thought to be a physical thing, but certainly our own experience in Mark Fisher Fitness. I think the thing is that. You and I have had interest in. Certainly, I think I’m not speaking of term when I say probably the bigger interest on your part, less so than the physical fitness stuff, was what this means for being a human right.

And fitness is this like dojo where yes, you’re getting healthier and that matters, right? Because your psychological mental wellbeing is a function of your [00:11:00] physiological wellbeing, right? We’re not robots. We need those inputs, but that it is also this opportunity to explore who we are and what we care about and to work on.

Maybe patterns that we have that are either we’re unconscious about or that we struggle with or we haven’t completely mastered. So taking an approach to fitness that is really rooted, maybe first and foremost in behavior change is something that I think is like absolutely the whole game going forward.

I think it’s [00:11:30] how you retain people. I think it’s how you get results. So it’s both important, I think, for the business’ longevity. But I think it’s also important for the industry to reach its calling, which is using fitness, but really is a foundation for just being a better whatever it is that you do in your life.

Yeah, 100%. And this insight for me was unlocked very early in mfs, in MFS existence where we were doing a program called Snatch in six weeks, which some of you listeners might know about, which was really intensive six week program. We, which we considered kickstart to [00:12:00] people’s health and hotness journey.

And I learned very early on that. We really couldn’t help. Most people came to that program for, to gain some strength, lose fat, increase their energy, general gen pop wants and needs. Mm-hmm. And I realized early on watching hundreds of people go through that program, even in the first year, that you can’t help people with their, with the losing weight unless you really take into consideration.

Their whole life. Their life. Yep. Their sleep, their nutrition, their social relationships, their professional demands. [00:12:30] Right. You really need to think about the whole person when you’re trying to help them achieve anything aesthetic. Yeah. While aesthetic or performance wise. And I think this opportunity is for the industry to really take that seriously.

So our invitation to this opportunity is to train your whole team, not just to be technicians, but to really be coaches, to really refine your service delivery, to support clients making really holistic change in their life. So that’s why we landed with this title of Coach Humans, not Just Bodies, so that we can teach our trainers to care as much about [00:13:00] the human transformation as they do about the technical.

Deadlift cues. Yeah, because to be clear, we want them to be good at the technical coach. Like we’re not disputing that when you get to the third. Opportunity. I think you’ll see like that obviously is important to us. We just were very interested in the behavior change piece and for what it’s worth, this one I think marries with the second one, which we’ll transition to in a minute here, I think, which is like leadership.

But I think this is also, frankly, also even serves a function in marketing and sales, I think is about being on other people’s agendas. And I think what that might [00:13:30] mean for us as a business going forward is we continue to flirt with bringing back the coaching conversations course and something that MFF did very well.

We’ve talked about over the years, but quite frankly haven’t been sure there was enough interest in the market. Is like helping trainers really focus on the interpersonal coaching piece. ’cause yeah, I think that’s, the knowledge gap is not that complicated. I think the gap, yes. The behavior gap is the whole game.

100%. Yeah. I think that’s a great transition to number two. So our second kind of opportunity in this manifesto is to be the leader you [00:14:00] wish you had. So to be the leader you wish you had, you wanna talk a little bit about how this came to be Fisher? Yeah, certainly. This is something that’s been very, also very important to us and interesting to us from day one.

This doesn’t map perfectly. It’s not as if the first is how you deal with your clients, others, how you deal with your team. But in practice, I think that another very important kind of relationship that Jim is gonna have is not just the Jim and the client, but it is the owner, the leader, and then the team, the people that the owner is responsible for.

[00:14:30] Creating opportunities for them optimally to grow as human beings and achieve their potential in the service of a mission that is worthy and bigger than anything anyone can obtain on their own. It’s certainly, you and I have been very transparent. I think about like our own journeys and the things that have been hard for us and the things that have come easily and less easily on that, but by and large, particularly in our corner of the industry, which is largely personal trainers and strength coaches that opened up a gym.

People, most of us didn’t have any sort of formal [00:15:00] training or background in a manager as being a manager and a leader and maybe an unformed thought, I think I could buy that. There’s, there is somebody said for having, I think a natural interest and an aptitude. For this, I think I heard something once, which is that which I think I buy, which is you can be a great human and be a really bad leader, but it’s hard to be a really amazing leader unless you’re also a pretty good human.

And there’s somebody said for creating structures and systems around people’s natural intuition. For people to learn [00:15:30] self-awareness and grow themself as a human being, to bring in an awareness of their own. Foibles their own issues, their own things that they navigate so that they’re as effective as possible with a wide range of humans.

Of course, any good organization is gonna have optimally some conflict and some dissenting point of views. And the leader is ideally going first and curating a learning organization where everybody on the team is feeling empowered so that they can bring forth their issues. And I have, unfortunately, anytime I talk about leadership, [00:16:00] I always have to qualify.

I have not gotten this right all the time. Like I know I’ve, I have messed this up. I’m certainly not perfect. But this again is a thing that, like in the world of training gyms hasn’t been talked about a ton. It’s it respectfully. And by the way, we’ve been part of this too, so I’m not judging it. It’s mostly like leads.

It’s mostly like how to get more leads and gym marketing and I, I get it. We do it too. I realize this is the red meat people. We want, as we’ve said before too, on this podcast, in the beginning, it’s all about leads, but at the end of the day, it’s actually all about leadership. It’s once you solve the money problems.

[00:16:30] It’s actually all about like the people problems going forward and or perhaps it should say the people opportunities. Clearly we have nothing to say about any of this. Yeah, I think it’s a, yeah. Seriously, we thought this will be a quick podcast. We’re all, we’re on number two. We’re doing great though. But I’ll just say this in case it wasn’t clear from the beginning, these five pillars or opportunities that we’re outlining here, they’re not opportunities just for all of you.

We’re including ourselves in this, right? We are not perfect managers and leaders. Right. And we are, we’re working on all this along with you, right? In case that wasn’t clear. So I think it’s a combination of [00:17:00] the thing you just mentioned, Fisher, and another stat that I think makes this a particularly tricky problem, which is most gym owners and frankly small business founders in general have.

Like we said, have almost no training, no official training on being a manager or being a leader, and not even just training experience at all. They were employees themselves who decided to take the, take the leap of faith, combined with the fact that a lot of research shows that managers and leaders obviously have an outsize impact on an organization’s success.

Yes. So you take all these people who have very [00:17:30] low experience or training and then put them in a position where they have just an outsized influence, whether an organization thrives or not, and it’s a sticky, that’s a sticky problem. And I think what we’re saying here. Is, as you’ve pointed out, is once you have enough money that you keep the lights on, right?

Once you solve the money problem, you have enough leads coming through on a regular basis that you have a viable product, right? Then really the rest is all about leadership, growing and scaling and developing a team that can consistently deliver is really all centered around having good [00:18:00] leaders and managers.

So I think this opportunity really is about, again, how young the industry is and how many of the businesses that we’re gonna keep. Popping up in our space are gonna be founders who are relatively inexperienced when it comes to management and leadership. So we really, as an industry, wanna get ahead of that and develop some certifications, some schools, some programs like we’re gonna be developing courses that really help our industry level up faster when it comes to like our management and leadership skills.

And I’m excited to be part of the solution on this [00:18:30] one because I think we have a lot to offer already and I think we’ll only keep getting, we’ll be a better and better resource for this over time. Important topic. Yeah. Alright, so number three. This goes back, we mentioned earlier that we care about excellence, we care about, we care about being great at being a trainer, a technical trainer.

And so the opportunity number three is to fall in love with the fundamentals, to fall in love with the fundamentals. This has a few angles. You wanna talk us through this one, Fisher? Yeah, I think this one maybe we can keep relatively brief as the last two are probably media as well, but mm-hmm. And this one I think is [00:19:00] relatively simple, which just like.

Gotta be great at the basics, like brilliant, the basics. Mm-hmm. This was obviously something that’s very important to us at MFF and certainly ’cause we looked at a few ways. Certainly I do think it’s, yeah, it’d be great at training is like a fundamental great at the service and the product you’re offering, but I, I think even.

More salient for most gym owners and people to aspire to master the craft is master the fundamentals of running a business, right? Which is like understanding systems and understanding your numbers, right? Even marketing, as I’m [00:19:30] fond of saying, it’s just another set of systems. It’s not this other thing.

It’s learning how to be good. It’s something that you do repeatedly. Uh, and then just doing it over and over and seeking endless 1% better at whatever those pursuits are. And I think, I think another. Thing inside. This one for me is acknowledging that. For often very understandable reasons. A lot of people, when they open up a gym, there’s just some things they don’t want to do and unfortunately they try to get away with just not doing it.

It just doesn’t [00:20:00] work. There’s a lot of things. These businesses are too small. I, again, marketing be an example. You can’t throw money at an ad agency. It’s just not gonna work. There’s a lot of things you will have to just hold your nose and get better at. There’s also very few things I think. You don’t develop some, maybe even begrudging enjoyment at it if you get good at it over time.

And the inverse is probably true. There’s probably nothing you really love to do that you’re very bad at. So I think really embracing the fundamentals of what it means to run a business, I think is a core, core thing. Uh, again, I don’t think that’s like a new message first perhaps, but it’s something that [00:20:30] felt important to us to lay out is like, this has to be a key color.

Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think I have much to add. I think you spelled it out really well. Just you gotta do the boring work, not just the stuff that excites you. And the boring work is often where the bottleneck is or the next stage of growth lies. Um, yep. And I think, yeah, I think it’s really well said. Alright.

Well at least number four and five, and as Mark mentioned before, these are the most kind of aspirational, the most, like we see the problem and we see the opportunity, but we don’t, we don’t know ourselves what we think the [00:21:00] solution. R. And so we’re inviting you to stream with us. So we’ve labeled number four.

Lower the barrier, not the bar. Lower the barrier, not the bar. Yep. You wanna take a swing at describing this one fisher? Yeah. So essentially it’s no secret. A lot of the industry, again, particularly in our corner, has had this flight to. Higher and higher average revenues per month. We have been a part of that conversation of charging the rates that you’re worth.

I think it’s true in the economy in general right now we’re talking about, at the time it’s recording this K shape recovery [00:21:30] where a lot of the consumer spending is going to the people that have won the game, they’ve won capitalism. Um, and the reality is we’re not against charging your worth. I think by all means.

We think that is important and it creates some complexity. ’cause if you’re not charging your worth, how do you pay your team well, which is something we also think is important. At the same time, certainly because of my background, I’ve never made it a secret. I probably have some triggers around this having grown up without money and the ease with which people be like.

Fuck the non rich people. Fuck ’em. They should just get their jobs. It’s okay. [00:22:00] And the reality is, if we build an industry, and certainly we are responsible for a group of gym owners that sell only services that require people to have $6,000 a year of discretionary earning for fitness. That I feel mixed about that.

Now listen there, is there room for policy to contribute to this? Might there be a world where there’s even tax code policy to make fitness write off? Yeah. For me, I’m like, full stop. That’s the obvious thing we should do. That it, it would bring [00:22:30] down healthcare costs it seems. Again, I’m not a tax policy wizard, but clearly that would be like a positive thing and that certainly would help.

And again, there’s nothing saying, I have no moral qualms with people charging a lot of money. To the people that have the income that want higher levels of services, and I think as per the name of this particular opportunity. WI think there’s opportunities without lowering the standards of Massly, just to find different ways to give access to people that don’t have as much resources.

And again, this [00:23:00] is sticky, right? Because I don’t have a great solution for this because you gotta pay the owner and you gotta pay the team. I think what we hint at in this, and fingers crossed, that’ll be the robot Des x Macina, the AI will come and save us. Is that potentially we’ll find more efficiencies in how we run our businesses, which will allow us to.

Help more people providing different kinds of services, and importantly, not the expense of making your business a complicated nightmare. ’cause that’s the other trick of this. We don’t wanna imply that like you [00:23:30] should, everybody should have thousands of services for all the things. That’s also not gonna work.

We’re just sensitive to the fact that, again, our corner of the industry has been all about increasing the average revenue per month as much as you can. Largely, we have also advocated for that. So I’m not saying that’s wrong. We just wanna make the case that there’s just a lot of people that are not gonna be able to afford five grand per year of discretionary earnings on their fitness.

And I want to fight for a world where we find ways to use our collective knowledge [00:24:00] as an industry to make sure that as many people as possible have access to great help. Yeah, 100%. I, I think that’s really well said. And I think the industry inception has really always had an accessibility problem. Yeah.

I think depending on who you ask, the, the industry has been more or less inaccessible to a lot of people from it’s early beginnings as a place for mostly like white men bodybuilders, where women maybe weren’t so comfortable queer people were not in the picture. Folks of color were probably not involved much at all to places now, where a lot of the, a lot of [00:24:30] the markets that we work with, it’s just the most expensive option in town.

Is to work with the quality of trainers and facilities that we work with. It’s the most expensive option. Sure, there are the big box gyms that people can pay 20, 30 bucks a month for, but are they really helping people make meaningful change in their lives? We know that the stats are, that they’re mostly not, they’re not actually doing as good of a job as gyms like work with can do.

And so I think just helping us envision a future in which, you know, gyms that offer really solid coaching, [00:25:00] really great programming, really keep people safe and inspire them to. Make real meaningful change in their lives. We just want that service to be more available to more people. Yeah. Whether that’s through things like sliding scale options or scholarships.

Yeah. Or leveraging what we do with technology as it becomes more and more accessible and available. Yeah. I think there are solutions. I think we just want all of you dear listeners, to help us be part of crafting those solutions. Yeah. And then bringing ’em to the forefront. Yeah, because certainly I think that’s something that I think we probably have the opportunity for us as an organization to think through more.

And some of our members are already [00:25:30] doing it, and we talked about this for years at MFF, but even things like scholarships, sliding scales, they sound like theory. They’re actually, they, they get tricky to figure it out because you are starting to value judgments Yeah. Around who can and can’t afford.

You’re also right in that, I think a part of this too, and this is something we worked on as we went through this, is. You know how we even frame this up because this is both like financial accessibility, but also people because of their identity feel marginalized, right? Feel unwelcome in those spaces.

Mm-hmm. And again, that’s probably not something that’s like a shock to anybody that follows for, that’s [00:26:00] important to us. And we think that we as a business can go further here. We think the industry can go further here, and I assume. Like a tactical thing probably is figuring out, okay, can we make a playbook for if you wanna rolled out a sliding scale, a scholarship?

Yes. Pay what you can. Is there a world where the people in your community that have more resources can help subsidize the people that have less? Yes. And again, it’s, I don’t have the great solve. We’ve tried in the past, but we’ve seen, and we have. We have lots of people in unicorn society who already are doing some of these things, who have actually people who [00:26:30] are invited to pay more if they can, to subsidize people who can, there’s people in that group who have weekend community classes that are pay what you can classes or sliding scale classes.

So there’s already versions of these things that exist. I think it’s just, it’s up to all of us to make sure that we create an industry that’s available to as many people who as wanted. I think that’s right. That makes sense. For the business model that we’re in, one thing that’s I that we’re not gonna be able to compete with, with a $25 a month big box gyms.

Yeah. Yeah, and certainly, listen, this stuff also does add some complexity. One idea that’s coming to me that I’d have to [00:27:00] think through, it’s probably a terrible idea, but maybe even interesting. I have started working with a new therapist recently, and he had a slide in scale, but there were just two prices and they weren’t that far apart, which was almost like using, I was like, oh, that’s interesting.

Yeah. And I’m wondering like. Maybe that’s it too. Maybe there’s just like a sec. Rather than getting super complicated, there’s just, there’s two prices. There’s the, yeah, the rate is this, but there’s a $50 off rate that just makes it a little bit more affordable. You pay what you can. If you can afford the full rate, that’s amazing.

If you can’t, but you want to work with us, it’s $50 off the rate. It’s gonna bring down the [00:27:30] average revenue per month sum. Again, there’s some considerations around like what percentage due. What, or maybe it’s a, you provide a cancel at any time option at the 12 month rate for people that aren’t in a position financially to sign up for the full year and you just like lower the bar a little bit for them to make it a little more doable.

That’s the kind of thing, I think there’s probably opportunities for. Said my friend. All right, we’re on our last one, number five, opportunity. Number five. We are calling this one Create Jobs Worth Having. And maybe I’ll kick this one off since you’ve had to do a lot of heavy lifting on [00:28:00] this, but this one’s pretty self-explanatory, which is throughout the history of this industry, it’s a lot of trainers had felt like their jobs were not legitimate.

That people didn’t think of being a trainer as being like a real career path, like wasn’t a quote, real job. And a lot of the profession has spent, a lot of the industry has spent a lot of time trying to legitimize itself, professionalize itself in some cases look more like a clinical environment. Yeah.

But, but we make jokes about this sometimes in the industry that people that wear in the polos carrying the clipboards. Yeah. Trying to look like a physical therapy studio or et [00:28:30] cetera. And all of that is a, is. Wrapped up in this problem of our industry has had a tough time actually creating a meaningful career ladder for trainers.

Yeah. Yep. That the organizations are pretty flat. Gyms usually have like staff, maybe one level of management, and then the owner, right? There’s not a big ladder for folks to climb, and so creating some sort of upward mobility for folks is challenging. But I think one of the things that we’re inviting everyone to consider here is how can you, in small ways.

Continue to offer [00:29:00] professional development to your staff. Mm-hmm. How in small ways can you create even small opportunities to get more, more money? Yep. Learn new skills. Yep. Make small improvements to their pay and compensation over time. How can more and more gyms afford to offer things like health insurance or, yeah.

401k Yep. Which is out of reach for most gyms we work with. The more and more we can create careers for trainers, I think the more our industry can advocate for itself. Yeah. Uh, as an industry that’s really on the front line of health in this country and other [00:29:30] countries, and we’re not often treated like it.

COVID was a perfect example of, we were really not. Considered essential workers, right? Even though gyms are the places people go most to work on and talk about their health and wellbeing. And I think this extends for me into us as an industry being better advocates for the kind of maybe tax incentives we need for people to afford gyms, to advocating for just laws around how gyms are handled, treated in certain towns.

Yeah, certainly New York is a tough place to open a gym for a lot of legal reasons. So anyway, I could go on, but what would [00:30:00] you add to that Fisher? Yeah, I think certainly the, a public advocacy piece. Also, I think as we see ourselves maybe having a bigger role, I mean forth worth shout out Health and Fitness Association, Liz Clark, that you know is a arm.

That association is one that, again, our corner for the most part has not had a lot of connection with. And again, I’m, yeah, speaking of this year, it’s like I’m on a mission to try to do some connection because I think we do have to combine if we wanna have some. Meaningful lobbying power. Right. It’s not gonna be neat.

I don’t know enough about it, but there are people that are doing it. And like the more [00:30:30] the industry pulls together, I think the more successful we can be, like advocating for common sense legislation that’s gonna support health and wellbeing. And then as far as the trainer specifically. This is, again, this is the sticky one for me because this combined with a desire for accessibility combined with desire to pay the owner, it’s those three individuals, like that’s the way this works.

In every business, there’s gonna be some tensions. So if you want to pay trainers top rate in your market, you have to make a lot of money, which means usually you’re gonna have to charge a lot [00:31:00] because you’re only gonna be able to do so much volume. Um, and that is complexity, right? And again, I think in the meantime, I think what we’ve already done well, and I think we’ll keep doing is to your point, as you mentioned, look for some of the places where the real estate is cheap, so to speak, right?

Mm-hmm. What are the obvious ways you can support people, develop more? Can you provide, create a learning culture, right? And create a place to work where people feel valued and cared for, and the stuff that doesn’t actually cost money. Can you create at least some. Career possibilities in your business, or at [00:31:30] least two strong.

Number two, further, we’re seeing more and more in the industry at large, and certainly in our community, people are now scaling up to 2, 4, 7 locations. That wasn’t a thing, and one of the cool things about that is. That creates more opportunities that haven’t been there previously for the an average gym.

And again, it’s still not solved a hundred percent. Part of like how you get around it is you’re just like upfront with the people that are quote unquote rank and file that you know, this is a couple here, tour of duty for the numbers to work. The people that are younger are gonna be paid less, which not [00:32:00] unreasonable.

It’s the way a lot of organizations and a lot of industries work. But I do think this is one of the ones that I think we don’t have a perfect solve for, but I think like the previous one. I think there are at least some things we think people could be doing a little bit better than they are, even though we’re the first to concede.

These two, I don’t think have an obvious net positive solution just because they’re invariably gonna be a little bit of tension. Yeah. And they’re complex. They’re more complex than some of the other earlier ones. Yeah. We wanted interest. Pick the wrong inverse. Yeah, it’s [00:32:30] true. It’s true. So to recap, friends are the five opportunities we outlined in this kind of manifesto is number one, coach humans.

Not just bodies. Number two, be the leader you wish you had. Number three, fall in love with the fundamentals. Number four, lower the barrier, not the bar. And number five, create jobs worth having. And so I guess maybe in our last minute or so here, Fisher should, what should people listening do with this?

Maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll go first just to say, I think my reason for wanting to share this was to [00:33:00] say, if any of this resonates with you. Let’s stick together. Yeah. If any of this resonates with you Yeah. And you’ve never thought about working with us, let’s work together. If this all resonates with you, you know, wanna work with us, at least keep listening to this podcast.

Maybe there’s ways we can influence each other to make this industry the best place it can be. Stay on our, get on our email list. If you’re not on our email list, follow us on Instagram. But yeah, kind need, let. Yeah, a lot of this impo, a lot of this requires a critical mass of, of people to come together and to wanna make this change.

So if this resonates with you, let’s [00:33:30] do it together. And another thing I would say is we didn’t make this because I think this is a model for gyms to follow. I think in some cases business unicorns is a different enough business than a gym that I think people are coming to us in some ways as thought leaders, as people who are kind of experts in the industry and are looking for, to work with people who.

A vision for what this industry and can do for them and their life and their family. And so I think my advice to all of you out there is you probably don’t need something like this for your gym. If there’s any version of this [00:34:00] that is useful for you to have as a gym owner is, I think having a clear mission statement I think is really useful.

Just a clear statement about what you hope to accomplish, what you exist to do as a gym, and maybe a vision statement that’s just a little bit about the kind of community and business. Culture you wanna create in your gym. Those things that can be useful. But this explicit kind of manifesto, which by definition has this kind of political nature to it, I don’t think that this is something I’m recommending gyms do.

Yeah. Would you agree with Certainly, yeah. Yeah. Certainly [00:34:30] not. I think like having clear values I think is like another. Cultural artifact. Yeah. Values, yes, because again, all these things, like ideally they also wanna be operationalized. It can be actually quite disenchanting to be in a business where this kind of stuff gets rolled out and doesn’t seem to change anything.

And, and not only that, but worth noting here, maybe as a final thought, is like fall in love with the fundamentals if nobody knows your business exists and your product is not good. I, I’m gonna get very frustrated with you while you’re spending so much time and energy wordsmithing like your values document, and maybe because it’s like a mea culpa, I feel like I, [00:35:00] I’ve unfortunately maybe been a part of.

A certain kind of like sensitive, thoughtful person spending more time in their values so that way they don’t have to go into the community and meet the actual people in their community. They wanna help. And I’m painting with a broad brush there of course. So, yeah, I don’t know the necessarily need an external manifesto per se, but I think yeah, a vision, a mission statement.

Some values and then, yeah, my final suggestion is fall in love with the fundamentals. Make sure you do the blocking tacking of the business and then make sure to the extent that you have cultural artifacts, they’re operationalized in some way so they don’t become like [00:35:30] meaningless words in a Google Doc somewhere that you look at once a year.

Yeah, great reminders. Great reminders. Awesome. We’ll leave it at that our, a very quick episode about our manifesto was 38 minutes long. Yeah, sorry. We did great. We did great. Thanks as always for great conversation. Fisher and dear listeners, I’ll see you on the next one. Have a kick ass week. Five[00:36:00]

up.