How to Have the Best Black Friday Ever 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. Hello, fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business Unicorns podcast. I’m here with Mr. Mark Fisher. Mr. Mark Fisher, how’s your week going? Oh, he is sprinting, she’s sprinting down the hall as fast I can. I know. We’re, it’s been a, it’s busy week. Yeah. I feel like I’m, this week I’m feel like I’m being punished for.

Not being here last week. Every time, every week when I’m gone, [00:01:00] I, there’s a line of people who want to wanna talk to me that’re just waiting. And I feel so bad that I just overload my schedule. Like sure, I’ll do 15 phone calls in a day. Yep. Yeah, because I enjoy it. So it’s nice. But at the end of the day, I’m like, wow, this was a long one.

All right. So we’re recording this podcast in the middle of October. It’s gonna be released probably somewhere again in the middle of October, and we’re. The holiday season. Yes. Which also means the holiday marketing season. So what I wanna talk about today is specifically about Black Friday, right? [00:01:30] Mm-hmm.

It’s a specific time of year where we, people all over the world are making very specific kinds of offers that, that people expect lots of savings this times of year. So maybe just start with, why should gyms participate in a Black Friday tradition? I think the first thing I’ll say is, if you wanna make this very easy, just go to.

Go do unicorns.com/brainstorm and sign up for the unicorn site, and then you don’t have to worry about any this stuff. I’ll just do it for you. One of the, we’ll just do it for you, our members get is Yeah. They get a par of it’s top mind is, I just [00:02:00] did the Q4 into Q1 marketing calendar. I’ll just say people use marketing calendar to mean different things.

I, I guess I tend to think it more as a calendar promotions, which is different than a content calendar or what you’re posting on Instagram or your email content, though it is. Delivered as content and emails on Instagram. So it’s part of what gets confusing. But I think part of our job globally is thinking through over the next, say three to six months, what kind of offers are we gonna be doing based on your service and your model and your bandwidth, and your skills and your market based on the [00:02:30] size of your list.

And. This is something that I would like to do for you. So if you are a gym owner and you wanna just do mine, you can just copy paste it. It’s very easy. It, it’s even design. So you just put in one name and one gym name. It’ll just automatically change. And then you can just copy. You can just edit. If there’s things that you wanna make in your own voice, which you should, and then you update the offer.

Because the offer, admittedly, that’s the thing that’s hard to do on mass. You all will have different offers. So that’s the first thing I’ll say. Back to the what should they, why they should be doing this. The reality [00:03:00] is this is a time of year where you can really, you know, if I were like a. So some might say stack cash, but Michael, I think the time I say stack cash, throw you out the window, not that it’s wrong, you stack these cash stackers, just not, not be the end here, but you can make money, which we want you to do well.

So yeah, because listen, this is a time of year where if you can do big offers, people are. Typically thinking about spending. Mm-hmm. It’s also no secret. We’re going into December, which tends to be [00:03:30] slower for a lot of gyms. You tend to see freezes, you tend to see dips and utilizations. You also tend to see a lot of people start to terminate in December and into January.

Yes. You old timers know January’s not always a banana ’cause you have new people coming in. But in December and January a lot of people are considering maybe they’re gonna do something else. Right. So we have an opportunity, I think, in one fell swoop to really drive. Nice amount of cash flow near the end of the year when things are gonna get a little slower.

We have an opportunity to maybe make some offers. They’re gonna increase utilization during a time of the year [00:04:00] where things are slower. And we also have the opportunity to make the sort of offers to help get people set up to really go into the new year with a plan and make sure that you’ve got those people committed to their fitness.

And of course. To the extent that it helps you commit to your gym as the solution to help them achieve their fitness goals. We could dig in a little bit more, but I think at a high level, that’s how I think about it. Yeah, no, I think you’re spot on. And I’ll just reiterate the things that really stand out to me, which is it’s time of fewer people plan to spend money.

That people are putting aside money to invest both in themselves and their families [00:04:30] and their health. And it’s also a time when you, as a gym owner are also seeing some freezes and some terminations. People towards the end of the year take a break over December, often through January and maybe start coming back in February.

In a lot of markets, it’s a chance for you to get some cash flow in the door before all those freezes or terminations take hold and and finish the year strong. So I think those are some reasons why, whether it’s Black Friday or Cyber Monday or small business. Sun Saturday, what, whatever kind of tradition you want to jump in here, I think the point, [00:05:00] all those points still apply, which this is a unique moment where you would benefit for some cash flow and people are planning to spend.

So why not jump in the pool and make a great offer? Yep. Um, let’s just jump right in. What is a great offer? What is the kind of thing that would make a Black Friday really successful for folks? Mm-hmm. There’s a few different ways one can look at this, and again, I want to once again preface a little bit hard to speak about this in a vacuum because there’s a lot of things that, that go into this.

And in a perfect world, I’d love. Once again, I have the chance to come to my Office hour, and I help customize this with you, but in [00:05:30] general, I like to take a big swing here as far as the kinds of offers that can look at a lot of things, but just give you some examples. What do you mean by Big Swing? The first point I wanna make is you might wanna consider having different segmented offers.

Based on your relationship with that part of your list. So longtime listeners know we tend to crudely break it down to three different sub buckets. You have your never been clients. These are people that who you have a professional relationship with, but they’ve never come in and done a membership. You have your former clients who you have a different kind of relationship with, and this [00:06:00] number for better force is always getting larger.

Every single month you’re opening. So this number never got smaller, but that’s okay ’cause there are people you have a relationship with that presumably liked you at some point and didn’t run away screaming. And then finally, you have your current clients now. If we’re doing this simply, and for most of you, I like, let’s just do this simple.

I might suggest, let’s have one offer for your former and current clients, or rather your former and your former clients and your never been clients, and then a separate offer for your current clients. And we’ll dive a little bit into what I think [00:06:30] makes a good offer for both of those. And I would note that the downside of that is if you give away some of the complexity.

In practice, if we’re talking about taking a big swing, it’s gonna be unlikely for a never been client, as an example, to sign up for a year long paid in full membership if they’ve never been with you. On the other hand, for a former client, that’s not impossible. Now again, that may or may not be the right fit, but it’s the thing that I think gets a little bit challenging about Black Fridays.

If you’re taking a big swing, you have to decide, okay, do I batch my former [00:07:00] clients with the offer for my current clients, or do I batch my former clients? With the offer for my never been clients. Okay. So I think in principle, an example of an obvious big offer is prepaying a year. Now, I don’t typically like.

Prepaids for a number of reasons. One of them, they obviously reduce your monthly recurring revenue for the following year. Number two, in practice, you really have to communicate what the terms are. It can get really sticky if you’re not communicating that they can’t and get their money [00:07:30] back. You can decide, depending on how hardcore you wanna be.

Some gyms even have stipulations that there’s no pauses and no freezes. During the membership, you can decide whether that’s true or not. I actually tended. Actually be okay with that because to my mind, it’s fine. I’m just getting a, the money upfront. And not only that, yeah. If the discount is steep enough, they’re willing to give away some of those perks if their savings is strong enough.

Yeah, yeah. That, that, that could be true. And in general, yeah. Speaking of discounts, my thinking here for the most part is I actually think. The tricky part is you don’t wanna give away the house, and that’s why this one I think becomes so dangerous is [00:08:00] because with love the end of a long day here. So I’ll just be so direct with you.

My love bugs most, you’re just not charging enough money that the business model’s not making sense as is. So if you give away 15% off that, we’re in real trouble now because you’re already not really able to pay your bills. I’m at the current rate. Okay. The good news is I don’t think you need to give away the house.

And admittedly, what I’m gonna offer as something to consider is a little bit of a mental accounting, but you could do something like. Prepaid 2026 now and gets December free. And what I like about this is you’re [00:08:30] getting people locked in. Now, I even like this for them psychologically. ’cause like we have a plan for the new year, we are getting a cool value.

And again, listen, if you do the math of it, I think that works out to almost 8% discount because essentially you’re getting 13 months for the price of 12. Okay? So that’s one option. And then I like to stack a little value on top of that for something that’s not gonna have a lot of hard costs, but you can add.

Some benefit on top of it makes it even more valuable financially that doesn’t have the same amount of hard cost for you, right? Because understand, if [00:09:00] you deduct $500, let’s say, off the cost of a year, that’s 500 less dollars than you have. On the other hand, if you add a pack of classes, a pack of sessions, a nutrition consult, even something that has hard costs like supplements, merchandise, whatever, those items don’t cost you that.

So you’re able to market it correctly as. Let’s say 500 additional value, $500 of additional value for the client, just hypothetically. But it’s not gonna cost you $500 to fulfill that, right? Hopefully it’s not gonna [00:09:30] cost you any more than a hundred to $200 of hard costs for whatever that is. So if you’re making a really big swing, that’s the one that I like.

And I’ll give you one more suggestion. I tend to like to actually create some real. Scarcity around this, because I also, if you have a gym of a hundred clients, I don’t know that you want to take 20 memberships upfront. It’s probably not the worst problem to have. And again, it depends on how you run this play, right?

It depends on how sticky your clientele is. It depends on how your [00:10:00] price, it depends on how big the discount is. There might be a case where, yeah, sure, just get that money. The last thing I don’t love about prepay is practically for a lot of people is not everyone is great at cash management. So a lot of gym owners, if they have an extra.

$40,000 sitting in their bank account. There’s a lot of shiny equipment that starts to look really attractive to them. So that is thing be cause in about, we want to be careful about that. But that is, I think, how I think about the biggest swing. I’ll pull up there for introductions. Then maybe we can talk a little bit about.

How you might think differently about a never been client ’cause they’re a different [00:10:30] animal. Yeah, no, I think that really is important. I think first and foremost, I think that for folks who are new to doing a high amount of email marketing, I think one of the first things I hope you take away from this podcast, if you haven’t heard us talk about it before, is having a really great segmented email list.

Yeah. Mark talked about having an email list of your current clients, former clients and people who have never been clients, and for many of you just. Pause the podcast right now and go make that a priority. If you don’t have that yet, yes, go do that, because then you can, as Mark said, you can get really [00:11:00] strategic about the kinds of offers you make to each of those groups.

And the perfect example Mark gave, which is that if you’re gonna make an offer to pay full for a year, that might be great for current members who are up for renewal, might be great for four members, but people who’ve never bought anything from you might not start. With a year commitment if they’ve never done a trial or low, better offer.

Full intense. Yeah. If they, another, let’s get married of doing’s. Yeah. It’s full intense. So I think that segmentation allows you to get a lot more advanced when it comes to the kinds of offers you’re [00:11:30] making. So I think Big Swing makes a ton of sense. Let’s talk about, uh, a. Smaller swing, maybe four, never been clients.

And then I do wanna talk a little bit about the flow of these campaigns, if we have a few minutes left. Yep. So let’s talk about never been clients. Yeah. So the first I’ll say too, is if you’re getting overwhelmed by the sorting, I have really great news because presumably whatever you’re doing now, you have hopefully have a list of your current clients.

Mm-hmm. So the great news is all you really need to find is a list of your former clients and then define your nevermind clients. It’s everybody. That’s not a current client or a former client. [00:12:00] It’s all the other people, right? And again, these are individuals that presume you have a professional relationship with.

Maybe you’ve taken my sage wisdom and you’ve added in family and friends that may or may not have started as a professional relationship. There’s someone you wanna keep in touch about the ways they might choose to work with you. ’cause some of them might also take action. For a lot of you, if you’ve been running paid ads for a long time, you might have a lot of unresponsive cold leads you got through paid ad that maybe actually might be viable leads.

But just, it just wound not being the right time. They opted in on a whim and they’ve hopefully been getting your ongoing [00:12:30] email marketing, and they’re perfectly aware of you and they’ve been considering you, but it just hasn’t been the right time. And of course, the magic of all promo offers are twofold.

One, when people can do things whenever they do them, never two. People buy when we are ready, not when they’re ready. And again, part of what Kira spoke to is this is a time of year when people are ready. They’re in a buying mode, right? Their wallets are open, so to speak. And the other thing I wanna mention here too, about all of this, just because this is sometimes a criticism of this approach you hear is, oh, don’t give discounts.

That couldn’t be [00:13:00] more wrongheaded. And by the way, I don’t think actually anybody says tone, gift discounts. I think that’s like a provocative click Beatty thing. Yeah, I think that’s a provocative clickbait thing. I don’t think anybody thinks that, but what I would agree is, yeah, you don’t want to give forever discounts and I’m not a fan of them as well, but something to shake the fruit from the tree to get them started.

Yeah. And what allows an allows you to offer discounts and do it well is when you’re charging the right amount to begin with. Also true charge, really the right rate then you can afford Yes. To take a little off the first month or two. Yes. And it not be so painful. [00:13:30] Yep. Yep. Yeah, because again, you’re not giving them a forever discount and you’re priced enough that you can build that in that it just essentially becomes essentially cost of acquisition, right?

It becomes like a marketing cost at that point. So for something that a never been client, again, this can look like a lot of things. I’ll give you a simple one. It could be like, sign up now for January and get December for free. Yeah, do you wanna be a little bit more ambitious? Maybe do sign up for January and February or sign up for January and February and March.

Pay it now and get December for free. Maybe mix and match. Maybe you also throw in a pack of extra [00:14:00] sessions, right? And again, you can think through what makes most sense for you in your model. Against one example. You could potentially also do something like if you have a six week challenge, it’s gonna start in January.

Maybe you offer that now. But you sell it then, and then maybe you give them some sessions that they can do in the month of December. Alternatively, another option, we did this at MFF for many years, is you could potentially do a pack sale, right? So maybe these are people that aren’t really thinking about the New Year yet because admittedly this, that’s a risk you take with the strategy.

Some people might be like, new. [00:14:30] January. What? It’s, no, it’s November, right? Yeah. So another option you have here is you could sell some sort of version of your membership. Maybe if you don’t usually sell packs. Maybe you only sell recurring monthly memberships. Maybe sell a pack that’s good for December, or maybe good for.

December and January, or maybe you sell something that expires the end of February, right? So you sell like big packs and it feels flexible and it’s special and it’s not like a membership. Again, you have to get the pricing right on all of this. And for some of these offerings, you’re not even [00:15:00] necessarily looking to give away the house on pricing.

Once again, you’re just offering it with a novel set of terms. It feels interesting. That allows people to swallow, in many cases, a much bigger investment. Then they might make it other times of year. So those are just some ideas. I’ll pull up there because I know we wanna talk a little bit about the flow too.

100%. The one thing I’ll just add to that very briefly is just that I think the reason part of the flexibility of terms really matters here is because the holidays for a lot of people already have so many commitments in them. People need that kind of flexibility of a pack. Makes a lot of sense to [00:15:30] sell.

Yeah, because I can’t commit to three times per week over. Christmas or Thanksgiving or Hanukkah or New Year’s Eve, or that people want the flexibility. Mm-hmm. You don’t have to give so much on cost if you’re giving on that kind of flexibility of membership usage. Yeah. I think really people value that a lot around the holidays.

I think that’s so, so yeah. This last piece I wanna talk about. Was really about the fact that this time of year there’s a lot of marketing noise. We’re getting in done with emails, ads, texts. These days I’ve got it out of freaking [00:16:00] control. And in some online retailers are hitting us up every day twice a day with ads for things they want us to buy.

So for us as email marketers or text-based marketers even, yep. We have to be assertive enough. To break through the noise and make sure our audience is seeing our emails, but we also don’t wanna be so obnoxious that our email list just gets tanked with people opting out. Mm-hmm. And so on average, what does a campaign like this look like?

How many emails over how long a time? Yeah, so I think this is the time of the year where you can spend a little social capital. I [00:16:30] encourage you to air on the hard side. Yeah. You know, you’re not an online marketer, so it’s not like literally every day. Right. Online marketers would tell you if you have a weak launch, you can do 28 emails and you’ll make more money.

But that’s a very different type of product that they’re very happy to light brand on fire and annoy people, and you probably will make more money, but you also need hundreds of houses of emails and an inexhaustible supply of new people to come on. That’s not gonna be the case. I think your brand matters ’cause you’re in such a.

Relatively speaking, no matter, even Midtown Manhattan, there’s a finite number of people in that geographic [00:17:00] area. So for Black Friday, I’m thinking you wanna rent more than just Black Friday. That’s number one. So typically you might know a lot of, like hardcore Mark fans will know, I like a five day window.

I think for this you could do five, at least five, maybe six, seven, maybe even nine. I would say this is the time of year too, where you could even do a teaser a few days out to get people hyped up and tease what’s coming. So it’s in their brain and. A couple things relate to that. First of all. Practically speaking, what I’m doing and advising people to do this year, and I think this [00:17:30] will work, but it’s a little bit of risk.

We’re actually doing an early Black Friday, so we’re not actually promoting it on Black Friday after Thanksgiving to Keira’s point, because there’s gonna be so much coming at you that we’re gonna start the previous week and have it end Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It’s also of note, as somebody that’s actually run gyms for many years, a lot of Europe staff are busy on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

They’re willing to help out, but they wanna have that long holiday weekend. So I like to run it. Beforehand and then tease it several days before, I think is another good move. [00:18:00] I think over that window, I’m gonna do probably three to four emails. I’ll probably do two to three. Texts, maybe one to two. Blast text, and then we’ll do you know at least two Instagram feed posts?

Maybe three. I think you can get away with a story every day or every other day, driving people to it for You wanna do in session announcements during the entire run for your classes? Maybe put up some QR signs and flyers, depending on how easy is it is to do. Perhaps you can put a banner on the website.

The [00:18:30] one thing oddly I wouldn’t recommend doing much with is paid ads just because if you change your ads, the algo won’t have time to understand it. And the spending is so heavy from retailers once we’re into that part of the year. I think for the most part, just drive people to a general ad to get them on the phone and then you can just sell them the Black Friday thing once they’re in conversation with them.

So it’s important to understand there will be an adaptation of your existing follow-up sequence if people are coming in through your normal channels because you have something extra exciting and special and you wanna be messaging that with your lead follow-up. Yeah. Great [00:19:00] overview, Fisher. I think that’s really helpful.

I think the thing that I hope stands out to our listeners is that when this five to nine day window is over, there should be no one in your orbit who doesn’t know this freaking offer exists. Yep. From people in person, getting this information from your trainer’s mouths to people in your social media, to people in your emails, to people whose text numbers, whose phone numbers you have, I think.

By the end of these five to nine days, everyone should have at least seen it all. No, and know it exists. They all know that’s the goal. That’s all. And I know we’re about to pop off here, but I’ll [00:19:30] give you two other things real quick. First of all, this is a great time for individual text, individual dms, and phone calls to hot leads Had never came in.

To former clients you particularly like to members you think would be particularly well suited for this offering. And second, although we don’t have time to go into great detail about this now, sign up for the unicorn site. I’ll do this for you. You could consider doing a downsell offer. So let’s say you do an offer that ends the Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, maybe Black Friday, when admittedly there’s a lot of stuff going on.[00:20:00]

Maybe that wasn’t the right offer because you took a big swing. Maybe now you do some sort of pack sale or some sort of relative down sale offering that starts that Friday, that goes maybe till that Tuesday for the people that didn’t wanna do the big thing. Maybe to do a smaller thing. And maybe part of that is perhaps even something like a utilization challenge you do in your gym, right?

Something to stay fit over the holidays with some sort of workout goal that allows ’em to go to the holidays and enjoy their life and is reasonable, but still gets them not having to start completely all over once they’re into January. Great. Yeah, so [00:20:30] many great ideas for our listeners to play with, so thank you Fisher.

I think it was a really great fast one about a very specific period of the year where everyone has the opportunity to get some extra cash in and and stack that cash stacking Benjamin’s. He loves to stack Benjamins. Alright, my friends, thanks as always for great chat. Fisher and dear listeners, I’ll see you on the next one.

Have kickass day. [00:21:00] Bye.