Special Episode: Simplify, Delegate, Grow: The Operating System for a Freer Gym Business with Mark Fisher

[00:00:00] 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 for 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

Hello, my friend. I have an exciting announcement for you. This coming September 11th and September 12th, it’s a Friday and Saturday, we’re hosting our Business Unicorns Retreat in Seattle. I’m so excited. I would love to see you there. The theme this year is people systems, because here’s the truth. Your business doesn’t grow past you as the owner [00:01:00] until your people can run it without you.

So we’re spending two full days on the systems that actually make that happen. How to hire well, how to develop your staff so they get better every single month, how to design a client experience that people can’t stop talking about. The stuff that turns a busy owner into an actual leader. That’s what we’re covering.

It’s two days. It’s in person with a room full of smart, ambitious people who really get what you’re building. And here’s the part you’ll wanna act on. Early bird pricing ends August 4th. Until then, it’s $499. Four hundred and ninety-nine dollars for two incredible days of content and connection. After August 4th, it jumps to $799.

So grabbing your spot now saves you 300 bucks. So come hang out with us in Seattle this September. Head to the link below in the show notes to grab your seat and come build something that lasts. Hope to see you there

Hello, [00:02:00] fitness business nerds. What’s up? Welcome to another episode of the Business of Unicorns podcast. Today is another special edition episode. I think it’s actually the fourth we’re sharing, and we’ve never done this before. What we’re doing is basically we’re giving you a sneak peek inside our Unicorn Society group, because every week in Unicorn Society, we do something called a live training, and it’s usually an hour-long workshop for all of our gym owners and leaders in our community.

And those sessions, until now, have stayed behind closed doors, only available to people in Unicorn Society. What we’ve done is we picked four of our favorites from kind of recent past, and we’re sharing them here with you for now as this kind of limited podcast series. And these are real trainings that we’ve given, so you’ll hear us share frameworks and case studies, and you’ll hear real conversation we have with our actual members.

You’re basically getting a seat in the room. So whether you are a gym owner or lead a team at your gym, excuse me, or hope to one day do both, I think you’re gonna get a lot out of these episodes. And today is the fourth episode we’re sharing, and [00:03:00] this one is really Mark Fisher at his best. You all know him and love him, and this is the guy who can really make business strategy sound genuinely fun.

And he does exactly that. It’s built around kind of three moves: simplify, delegate, and grow. And Mark starts with getting your model right. He talks about pricing, retention, capacity, payroll, what he calls the big five, and he goes through all of those in great detail. Then he gets into delegation, how to stop doing everything yourself and buy back your time with the right help and real systems, so how to leverage your time more in the business as it grows.

And then he closes on growth, the third piece of the puzzle here, and he treats marketing and sales as a repeatable system instead of what many of us do, no judgment, is random acts of hope. So instead of thinking like marketing and sales as just trying stuff and throwing spaghetti against the wall, he really talks how to– talks about how to make those repeatable [00:04:00] systems.

I love this talk because I think it’s practical, it’s honest, it’s really the clearest roadmap I know, and frankly, we know for building a gym that gives you more income, more impact, and more freedom, which is what I know all of you want. So get out your notebook. You’re gonna take lots of notes for this one, and let’s dive into this episode with Mr.

Mark Fisher

I wanna begin asking for a little bit of grace. Can I get a little bit of grace here? I’m gonna start with something that I think is gonna be the most valuable part of the entire day. It’s a little bit mindsetty. I s- promise you this is gonna be useful for you, and I really wanna thank you because I promise we’re gonna get into tactics, we’re gonna get into actions.

You wanna write things down, I promise. I have Santa’s bags of goodies for you here today. But everything we talk about today is gonna be more effective if I take you through this exercise first. So what I would love for you to do, I’d love for you to do, is I’d love for you to write this down, okay? And I mean it.

I’m gonna keep asking. I beg of you, this is gonna be better if you’re acting in real time today. I wanna get some clarity on where you are [00:05:00] now and where you wanna go. So for today, so today is October 30th, 2025. I want you to estimate what do you think your 2025 income’s gonna be? And I’d love for you to actually write this down.

We’re gonna do a lot of intimate stuff that’s for you. No one will see it. I presumably, hopefully by this point, we have some sense, we have some sense of how much money we’ll be making this year. It’s not the only thing, but it is a thing. So write down your anticipated income for 2025. I want you to also to identify, hopefully we know this number offhand, I want you to identify your active clients.

I want you to identify your active clients as of today, October 30th, 2025. And then finally, I want you to identify your 2025 days off, okay? And because I know some people ask, “What do you mean by days off, Mark?” It’s up to you, right? You’re the king and the queen of your gym. You decide. A strategic coach or program I took for several years, they have a very tough definition of this.

For them, a day off is no work from the [00:06:00] minute you get up until the minute you go to sleep. You can’t check work emails. You can’t do work on Instagram. You can’t listen to business podcasts or YouTubes. For shame, right? So they have a kind of intense definition of this. I don’t think you need to go that far.

I will say, if you never take entire days off, it is something to work towards. Even if you love your work, like I do, I promise you, if you’re not taking one, two days off on the regular, you’re missing an opportunity to come back to work like a tiger on Monday morning after you’ve had a break. So if you’re the type of person that doesn’t really need days off, it’s even more important for you to take these days off.

I promise you’re gonna be better at the thinking of running your gym if you have a little time away to allow your tiger hunger to instantiate itself. Now, if you prefer, it could be like, okay, I define days off as I’m checking some emails, but I’m not going to the gym. Or maybe you use another proxy here, right?

Understand, I’m trying to get some numbers for income, impact, and freedom, because let’s be honest, that’s what most of us want, okay? So if you prefer to use a different freedom [00:07:00] number, maybe it’s days out of town. Maybe you love to travel, and you’re happy to work every day, but you like to travel, so maybe you use days out of town for this year.

So this is our start, okay? Next up, we have the future. We have the future

Ooh, sorry everybody. Okay, so for this one I want you to identify 2027. I wanted to, to tee this up for you. Things have gone really well, okay? You have followed everything I’ve told you to do over the next two months. You have set a foundation, and we have absolutely launched into 2026. 2027 further compounds.

So you have 26 months of growth from today. So how much money would you need to make in 2027 to be excited? Okay, it’s not the only thing, but it is a thing. I want you to write this down because I really want to challenge you here, because a lot of people are afraid to say what they want in life, and you, my angels, you’re my little baby love bug angels, okay?

I want you to get honest with yourself. This is for you. You don’t have to share this. What would you need to [00:08:00] make to be, like, excited in 2027? It should feel doable, but maybe a little scary and exciting. Next, this one is a little bit easier to figure out because you can just do the math, okay? So it’s 26 months from today.

26 months from today. That would mean that we have 52 more clients if we grow at an average net of two clients per month. Now, that, there’ll be ebbs and flows. We’re a seasonal business. Or maybe if it’s three net, that’d be 78 clients. So if we’re having this conversation in 26 months and you have 78 more clients than today, how does that change your income, the impact you’re making, the opportunities you’ve created, how much fun your business is?

So you decide for you. Again, maybe it’s not that number, but how many clients do you have at the very end of 2027? And then finally, 2027, whatever proxy you did, how many days off? I want to reiterate, you can’t do this wrong. You’re in charge of your life. I’m not your boss. I’m your pal, [00:09:00] right? I’m your pal, okay?

So you do this however you want, okay? You can decide, “I don’t need any more days off than I have now.” That’s perfectly fine. “I just want to help more people.” Amazing. That’s great. But I want to get some numbers on where we are and where we want to go. Heidi asked a question, “Is it personal income or studio income?”

It is personal. Thank you, Heidi. Yeah, I want to care about what’s personal in it for you, and we’ll talk a little about how we get there with the studio revenue. It’ll be part of our content today. Great, so let’s see some yeses in here. I know Natasha’s in the car, so Natasha, you don’t do this. I want you to drive, Natasha.

Okay? You’re in the car. Drew, are Sundays as days off? Yes. Yep, Sundays are days off. Fun fact, if you have a team member that takes off weekends, two weeks paid time off, and federal holidays, that has them off 125-ish days per year, to give you a little bit of sense. So maybe assume as the business owner you’re at, what, 200 days off per year?

Wink, wink. Okay, now maybe you don’t, [00:10:00] maybe you like working a lot. Okay, I’m, again, I’m not trying to prescribe here. You decide what works for you. I just do want to make the point that having Sundays off is a good idea. Okay, now thinking about 2027, what do you need to get there? So now I want you to write down on paper.

I’m gonna give you 60 seconds here. I want smoke coming off your pen or your keyboard. What are all the things you need to get to that targeted goal at the end of 2027? I want you thinking what are skills you need to develop? What are systems you need to roll out or improve maybe? What are resources you might need, right?

By resources, a key hire. Could be funding. Maybe another lease or two. Maybe you’re gonna open up several locations, right? Maybe it is a vendor, right? Maybe you have a key vendor you need to find, a great CPA, right? Whatever it is. Maybe write down mindsets, right? What do you need to believe? What needs to be true about your self-identity to achieve these goals?

So I want you to write this down. This is a broad survey. I’m… What are all the things you need [00:11:00] to get to that goal at the end of 2027, those clients, that income, that kind of freedom? Okay, about 15 more seconds. If you think you’re done, you’re a liar. Keep going. Write down a couple more. Write down what else do you need?

What do you need? Are there systems, resources? Okay, thank you. You can keep writing if you have a few final thoughts here. I am going to tell you something that every other business coach and book and podcast and YouTube has failed to teach you. And it’s not that they have not tried. They maybe even did try.

They maybe even said the words, and you just didn’t at that time have the ears to hear. It is something I myself confess I, I h- seem to have to learn again and again, so you’re in good company. It’s something that I feel like I’ve learned again and again. It’s taken me years to get better. Admittedly, with having struggles with this at higher levels.

It has probably cost me more money than I care to admit by getting this wrong at times, right? It’s a very normal [00:12:00] challenge, and I’m going to tell it to you today because you need to know this to survive going into 2026. It has gotten… This business is too competitive now. Every year it gets harder. Every year margins get squeezed.

There’s more competitors, there’s more gyms. Every year this gets tougher.

So this is a bold claim. So now whatever I say will feel wet farty, so let’s acknowledge that. But here’s what I believe. I feel very strongly about this. If you show me a gym owner that is not seeing the progress at the rate that they want, I will show you someone that is not making decisions in certain key places If you show me a gym owner not succeeding at the pace of progress they want, I will show you someone who’s not making decisions in certain key places I think that’s true professionally.

I think this is a good time to reflect on life. I like to think about you as a whole human. Probably true in personal matters as well, okay? So I want you to identify now, again, you’re doing this for you. You’re not gonna share this. I want you [00:13:00] to be real honest with yourself. Where is a place right now in your business where you are not making a decision?

Okay, this is for you. Where are you not currently making decisions? And to give you a little bit of context here, sometimes not making decisions looks like I’m not sure what to do, right? Sometimes it’s, “Oh, do I fire this trainer or not?” Right? Or, “Do I make this key hire or not?” Right? Or is it, “Do I– Am I opening up a second location or am I not gonna do it?”

Or, “Do I make this big investment in paid ads or do I not do paid ads?” But sometimes, and here’s where I get in trouble, y’all, as your pal Mark here, right? ‘Cause I’m not coming to you as the guy that’s got it figured out, right? What it looks like for me is saying yes to everything. I don’t know if any of you have this affliction.

Sometimes your pal Mark says yes to a lot of things. And sometimes, by the way, it looks like you’ve made the mental, the theoretical commitment, but not in action. So the example here would be like, “I know I wrote down what I need is leads. I’m committed, I need leads.” But then if I audited your schedule, we’re doing like 30 minutes per week maybe on [00:14:00] marketing stuff.

And again, these are normal things. You’re not a bad person. These are normal issues. I just wanna highlight that sometimes when we are not making decisions, it’s not always looking like I have two choices and I don’t know what to do, okay? So my hope is you have found something that i- is maybe causing you a little bit of tax, right?

Because here’s the cost. When we’re not making decisions, it functions as like gravity on everything we’re doing. There’s just like mental fragment. It’s very different when we feel clear and we’re going forward. Now, the last thing I’ll say about this, okay, and again, I, I thank you for starting off with some mindset stuff.

I promise I’m gonna get tactical. Here’s the last thing I wanna say. I am not advocating for impulsive decision-making. That’s not what I’m saying, right? That can be bad, too, right? If there’s risk of financial or physical ruin, sometimes you wanna take a beat, right? I’m not saying you need to make decisions quickly.

I’m saying we need to get enough information, we will never have perfect knowledge, and then we have to go. Right? Now, if… Listen, if you’re gonna [00:15:00] open up another location or you’re gonna ask someone to marry you or have a kid, you wanna take a beat, right? Because certainly if something is unwoundable and you cannot undo it, it’s worth thinking about it.

I’m just making the case that more typically, a lot of us waffle for too long on things when it’d be better to move forward. Because particularly, if it is a decision that we can unwind, once we’re in momentum, we have data, right? A lot of you, I’m sure you’ve heard of this, like bias for action, right? It’s like bias for action.

Okay, what does that mean? I think it means, like, just make the decision. Go. Do the thing, right? ‘Cause even if it doesn’t work, you now have the opportunity to unwind. Whereas if you’re stuck in paralysis, that’s gonna have a real tax on your brain, on your business, on your team, on everyone around you.

Please write yes if this is all making sense. Write yes if this is all making sense. And thank you again for playing along. I appreciate you so much. Thank you for going on that little journey. My hope is we have maybe a little bit more clarity if in fact this rings true for you and there’s some places.

And I now wanna teach you some shit, and I [00:16:00] promise this actually is gonna map very much to the first section when we get to the model, which is so important. I’ve never had the chance to share it the way I’m going to today. So I think you all know who I am, so I’m gonna fly. My name is Mark. I ran an unusual gym for many years called Mark Fisher Fitness.

Ninjas, unicorns. We did really well. We were in a lot of local and national media. We were on the Inc. 500 as one of the fast-growing companies in America. We were in Men’s Health, TEDx Talk on culture with my business partner, Michael. The very, very tacky stat that is thrown around is that business did almost $34 million in the 13 years that we ran it.

We sold at the end of last year to a longtime Business for Unicorns client and former MFF trainer, Coach Fury. It has been rebranded to Speakeasy to Strength. It’s down the street, and I’m very proud it’s still there today kicking some butt. Just got a voice text with Fury about their grand opening party just now.

I spend my days these days, however, now working with gym owners, helping them to build a gym and a life that they love. The main way we do that is a coaching group called The Unicorn Society. A lot of you here on this call, hello, are members of The Unicorn Society, and I wanna [00:17:00] acknowledge for everyone’s benefit, there are some people today on this call or watching the recording later that are guests.

So Unicorn Society people, hang with me. I might need to give a little bit more context like this for our guests, but I’m gonna move through this pretty quickly. And then at the end of the call, I’ll beg your indulgence. People that don’t care, I’ll warn you to tune out for five minutes. I’ll tell you a little bit more about what that’s looking like in case guests want to work with us more, but my focus today is being valuable to you, and I wanna drive us through, ’cause I also wanna make sure we have at least 10 minutes for Q&A at the end of our 90 minutes together.

Finally, I’ll say I still own a gym in New Jersey. I’m a franchisee of a small group franchise brand, which is to say I got a background doing giant mega gyms with unicorns and ninjas, and a current– I run a very normie, non-personally branded gym that is a small square foot, small group training gym, lean staff, similar to the types of gyms I advocate you all consider running.

And I wanna give credit where it’s due. I’m only able to do that because I have an amazing fitness director, Alana, who might– may or may not watch at some point, but she’s the one really running the show over there. I’m supporting her. [00:18:00] Okay. Last thing I’ll say quickly is we’re gonna focus a lot on the what today, but this is a big survey, which means I don’t get into how for everything.

Unicorn Society members, you have playbooks for everything I’m talking about today. You– My suggestion to you is- Please, I beg of you, bring this to coaches, to, to one-on-ones to identify the most important next action, ’cause I don’t wanna give you shiny object and you leave this call with, like, 1,000 things you’re gonna do, or to drastically change the direction that your plan is headed in because you got a new idea.

Write down the ideas, but let’s make the decisions in consult so that we’re doing things in methodical fashion, okay? I’m a little… I just wanna make sure, ’cause this is a big-picture survey today, I don’t want this to get shiny object. I wanna dig in now and start with today’s conversation for simplify, delegate, and grow.

Raise your hand or write the word yes if you’re most interested to learn about simplify. I know it was a lot of you. I’m excited to talk about all of these. If I’m being honest, I’m excited to talk about all those things. I’m really, really excited to talk about simplify, so follow along with me here.

[00:19:00] Arguably, I could have made this simplify, grow, delegate. I think there’s a case to be made for either. I think you’ll see when I get in that section. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past year where I have had the opportunity to click up the hood of the best gym owners in the world, a lot of friends of mine that have very large, successful gyms, certainly a lot of members of the Unicorn Society and the Leadership Society, people that have hired me for mentorship days.

I have seen some gym owners doing Looney Tune numbers, numbers that five years ago were virtually unfathomable. And the thing I will tell you is about the people that are doing it well is they got the model. So I wanna dig in what we mean by get the model right It wasn’t what I did when I started so listen, I can’t tell you…

A lot of you know my story, right? I don’t have a rags to riches story. I was like, “I was at a gym, was destitute, and I was selling my body for drugs.” Like, I don’t have that story. We did well outside the gate, but what was also true is I was very stressed those first few years. And if you don’t get the model right, or I’d say if you get some of the model, you can still make, [00:20:00] like, the numbers work, and that’s cool.

But I don’t know, if you’re on this call, I bet you care about more than just money is, like, my bet if we’re– if you and I are friends and you’re connecting with me. And the stress involved of having a business that is unwieldy, that is constantly managing the missed expectations and the feelings of a cast of thousands of different team members and clients, it’s not fun.

It’s challenging, right? So we gotta get the model right first, right? A guy who did this well, uh, our P- pal Paul here, who’s in Leader Society. So Paul has twins, and that’s cool, and I like that ’cause I’m a twin. So a few things about Paul to understand is, yes, Paul’s good at growing his business. Since he worked with us, we went from 15 to 20K, up to 60 to 70K.

I think that’s over three-ish years, may- maybe four. But he’s grown. He’s also delegated. He’s moved two hours away from the business and runs it mostly with the help of a general manager. The thing I want you to appreciate is Paul got the model right. The biggest change to my mind, I think Paul would say this, I don’t think he’s on the call ’cause he’s probably with his kids, but Paul, if you’re here, you can pop in.

The biggest [00:21:00] change is Paul went from one-on-one to small group. Now, to be clear, I am not saying that everyone on this call should do small group. I’m not saying one-on-one can’t work. I’m just saying that, like, dollars to donuts, that is gonna be an easier model to run, and at the very least, we should consider that when we’re thinking about the types of gyms that help us impact people the way we want and build the life that we’re loving to live.

So the Business Unicorn Big Five Assessment Unicorn Society members, you’ve already done this. Guests, if you stay to the end of the call, I’m gonna give you this as a template so you have access to a copy of it in case you wanna do it. But I’m gonna talk through it, so if you’re watching the recording later, I’m gonna give you enough insight this will be useful.

I think of this as the top level scorecard in the way that if you go to a GP, they’re gonna take blood pressure, we’re gonna look at cholesterol, we’re gonna look at fasting glucose. Now, this doesn’t tell us everything, and sometimes a top level number doesn’t look where we’d want it at first glance, but then you get to the lower level numbers and you’re like, “Oh, the selenium is okay,” right?

I’m not a doctor, I don’t know. But understand this is an imperfect model, but it is a [00:22:00] useful model because I know a few things, right? If we get these right, we’re likely going the right way, and if these are not working, something is gonna usually need to be changed. So first thing we wanna understand is are you charging enough?

Talked a lot about this. I’ll talk about this briefly today ’cause I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but obviously, if the math doesn’t math and you’re not charging enough, it doesn’t matter because even at your theoretical max, your numbers aren’t gonna work, to say nothing of the fact that most of our gyms will never get as big as we think they will when we do projections on a spreadsheet.

Are clients staying long enough? So this one is important. A lot we could say about the how to do this, but in general, if our retention, if we’re losing more than 5% of our clients per month, that’s less than ideal. Now again, I would further titrate that number to your gym if I knew more about your pricing and your model and your terms.

But in general, if we’re losing 10% client per month, that’s gonna be a lot worse than 5% more per month. Because the thing I don’t think people always appreciate is your attrition percentage is the exact cap of the [00:23:00] business. Because for any given model in any given market, there’s usually gonna be a cap on how many new members you can sell per month, okay?

So just for sake of argument, just to play this out, let’s say in practice, and this is not sure, so you can do better than this, but let’s just say you really can only sell 10 new members per month. Okay, at 5% attrition, you’re gonna cap out at 200 members, ’cause that means you’re losing 10 members per month.

Make sense? At 10% attrition, you’re gonna cap out at 100 members per month, ’cause now you’re still losing 10 members per month. So retention is a big deal. I’ll just give you one micro pro tip. Profit is downstream of retention, and retention is downstream of attendance

Maximizing capacity. Are you maximizing capacity? I’ll talk a little bit more about this, but this means are we offering sessions that are not being utilized? Are expenses in control? Are we spending too much money to get the revenue that we’re getting? And the backside of this means are you as the owner paying yourself enough?

Now, [00:24:00] what’s enough? I don’t know. It depends. It’s very subjective, right? I’ll say this. At a high level, and Unicorn Sided members, you know this, we don’t usually wanna see expenses for non-owner stuff, right? So if you back out your W-2 pay, your perks, if your perks, profit, all that stuff, if you back all that out, we don’t wanna be spending more than 70% of the dollar that comes in on non-owner stuff, and 3% to 4% is gonna go to credit cards, okay?

Now, can you do better? Absolutely. There’s people on this call and people in the Unicorn Side that do 60%, and they have 40% left over. If you have two owners, you might need to be targeting 50% expenses, because with two owners working full-time in the business, in theory, you’re working full-time in the business, you’re able to take a lot of the pay that would otherwise go for payroll.

If you have a smaller gym, in some situations you might even have a lower number of expenses. And yeah, within reason, if you’re doing 1.2 million, yeah, maybe you can get away with 25% and be not unhappy about that, okay? Ultimately, you get to decide. I’ll give you [00:25:00] the other way that I think about this, is less about percentages and more about absolute dollars.

This is an update. Unicorn Side members, this is new. This is new for you. So I used to say 100K total owner compensation, which is how we refer to your profit distributions, your W-2 pays, your perks, like your taxes paid for by the business. 2026, I’m thinking it’s probably more like 120K in most markets, right?

Again, you decide. You might be very happy making 80K in your market and having a very large percentage of the revenue go to your compensation. That’s fine. I’m not here to tell you anything is right or wrong. I am just saying that for most gyms in most markets, I would encourage you to shoot a little bit higher.

And then if we back this out, we say, okay, if it’s 30%, or let’s make it easy, let’s say a third is going to you, then we want 360K, and then you keep 120. Or I should say there’s 120 left over, right? You want 150K, which by the way, not uncommon, pretty common in our community. Now we need to do 450K [00:26:00] with two-thirds going to pay all the other non-owner expenses.

So again, you decide what is right for you, but that’s how I think about that. This is a screenshot of the big five. Again, guests, stay till the end. I’ll give you this. Unicorn Society members, you already have this. You don’t need it strictly, but it just helps because it just does the math automatically.

So a little bit more context here. Again, pricing too low. You can go to businessofunicorns.com, get the Raise Your Rates playbook. It’s gonna tell you not only the rates that I suggest, but also how to fix it. Like I said, we’re doing a lot of what today, but if you want the how, that how is available on the website.

This is a very important how. Most people start charging too low, very common. It is a fixable thing. But if you don’t charge the right rates, none of this works. I just wanna highlight the key thing we’re thinking about is how much you’re charging in relation to the coach-to-client ratio. The coach-to-client ratio is what matters here because that is going to impact what is the payroll required to fulfill that session.

Whether you pay hourly or salary, it’s the same. The big cost is what is the payroll required to fulfill that [00:27:00] session. And if your rates are not high enough, you just don’t have enough money to pay people what ideally you’d wanna be paying them, right? To say nothing of having enough left over for you.

Again, more details in the Raise Your Rates playbook. Now, these two I wanna bundle together, and this is the one I’ve done wrong. I did this wrong, everybody. So too many services and complicated terms. I love you so much. I ain’t trying to trigger you because there’s probably some of you on the call.

Remember, you can do nothing wrong in my eyes. My love for you is unconditional. And some of you, you’re doing too much shit. Some of you, I love you. It is not uncommon sometimes where you have one-on-one and small group and large group and sports performance and kids fitness and online coaching and life coaching and supplement, right?

Too many things, right? We want less things. Now, leaving aside ancillary services, which, okay, like maybe there’s a case for a little bit of side business of a cold case of water or something. Okay, fine. I’m not talking about that. But if we have too many services, they will tend to have– A number of bad things will happen.

My least [00:28:00] favorite– Can I tell you my least favorite? I’m sad. I’m sad to say my least favorite because some of you probably did this because you looked at MFF. My least favorite is having a large group service that you offer and a small group service that you offer. If your business is working and you’re happy with what your money, you’re making, do not change anything, right?

Don’t change anything because in a vacuum I don’t like it. But My experience is your large group will tend to cannibalize your small group because it is cheaper, and people will not understand why you would t- why they’d spend more money for this not fun, boring class. Okay? They’re just… They’re different services, right?

So they will tend to cannibalize each other. It tends to be hard in a lot of markets with a lot of people to explain the difference, which leads to the second thing I love about this. It’s just a lot to explain to everybody. It’s just complicated. It’s complicated to explain to prospects what you do.

There’s gonna be different avatars that prefer these different services. There’s gonna be a slightly different set of benefits and outcomes between results, experience, and relationships. It’s gonna look different. A- and related to all that, you’re gonna need a [00:29:00] different set of onboarding, a different kind of team member, a different set of quality control systems, a different set of oversight for every service that you offer.

That gets very complicated, very difficult. It’s not lean. It’s not wrong. By the way, like Mark Fisher Fitness, I’m not trying to brag here, but we did four million in 2015. That’s gonna, that’s gonna stand for probably 10 years before anybody does that in 4,000 square feet. We did, and it worked, but it was very hard.

And at least at this point in my life, I prefer a simpler business that’s a, a little bit just easier to run, ’cause you just… It’s just so hard to manage that, okay? Complicated terms I think are another piece of this. This is when we offer one, two, three, four, five times your unlimited frequency, and then you offer a month-to-month, a three-month, a six-month, a 12-month.

“But Mark, what should I offer?” Okay, listen, you do you. I think for most of you, one tent pole l- group model, whether it’s small group or large group, is a great thing to build the business around, and then you maybe have some higher price premium [00:30:00] personal training on top of that. And by the way, pro tip, if you’re an owner and you wanna get off the floor, you charge $300 an hour.

Maybe not literally, but you can charge a lot, and then some people will still pay it, and you’ll be happy to do it. But I don’t mind one-on-one. Understand I’m a fitness nerd first. I don’t want the fitness… I don’t want the business tail to wag my dog. What? But I think there’s a place for one-on-one, right?

Like some people, that’s the better model. I’m not kidding myself to think that everybody should do six-on-one or even four-on-one personal training. I’m just saying that for a lot of people, it’s gonna be better for everybody because they pay less, they can train more often, the gym makes more money, you can pay your staff more, okay?

Now, as far as the terms, I like a two and a three time a week. You can have a back pocket one time a week that maybe you need to pull out, ’cause somebody can only train one time per week. That’s fine, just charge appropriately, and don’t make that the main thing you offer. Talk about it a lot. And then as far as a cancel anytime or 12-month, I think they can both make sense.

Obviously, 12-month is harder to sell but tends to get better [00:31:00] retention, and vice versa. One of my favorite moves here And this already starts to veer into, to complicated, but one of my favorite moves here is you always offer a two or three time a week cancel any time, and then you have a back pocket 12-month that you offer in the event that they can’t afford your cancel any time rates, or you offer maybe a month or two in for somebody that’s having a good time.

The key thing there is all these other numbers we’re talking about have to work if everybody’s paying the cheaper rate. You can’t build your business on the higher rate and then sell a bunch of the cheaper things, ’cause then it just doesn’t work anymore. Your margins don’t work. Two other things I will bundle together, poor utilization and rent too high.

So what I mean by poor utilization? Okay. By poor utilization, we could, in theory, get by with offering 20 sessions per week if every session was utilized, if there was no breakage, right? You have 60 clients training twice per week, 120 sessions, six on one. You have 20 hours you could get away with, but instead we’re offering 35 hours because people [00:32:00] asked for Tuesday at 2:00 PM, so we added it, right?

So if I look at your utilization, I’d like to see this at least at 75%, ideally 80, 85%, and instead it’s at 37%. So you’re getting the price for whatever your coach to client ratio is, but you’re dealing with just a handful of people per session. It’s not the best way to do it because it means you’re on the floor too much and/or it means that your payroll’s too high because you’re paying for a bunch of sessions that you don’t actually need.

Rent too high, I think, is another version of this. So again, I wanna say I’m not saying this flippantly because I’m aware. I don’t want anyone like being like, “Mark is beating me up today,” right? I love you. There’s solves for all these, by the way. Even this one, I admit, it’s hard to solve the rent thing if you just got too big a space, but there’s still some solutions.

We get to the Q&A, ask me some things, and I can help you out here, okay? So when the rent is too high, often but not always… Sometimes it’s just the rent is too high, right? Which means the… And we like to see the rent being no more than 15%, closer to 10% if you [00:33:00] can. If you’re an urban market, sometimes you have to go up to 20%, okay?

But even if the rent was the same, you don’t want more space than you need. If you deliver, let’s say, a four-on-one training model, and you could offer it in 800 square feet, but you offer it in a 2,000 square feet, yeah, maybe you might do some more interesting locomotive patterns. That’s probably true. But you can’t charge any more, right?

The coach-to-client ratio is the primary determinant of the pricing, so it’s just way more expensive to run that model. Your only real levers, or I should say your biggest levers, to improve profitability on the business are rent, payroll, and marketing, right? Those are the big levers, and it’s mostly payroll’s really the big one, right?

So the other thing, the final thing I’ll say about this that I think is not always appreciated, sometimes it feels like, “Yeah, why not? Just get more. Who cares? Whatever.” The problem is the build-out’s gonna be more expensive. Even if your 4,000 square feet and your 1,500 square feet are both $3,000 per month, just give you big numbers.

[00:34:00] It’s still more expensive for build-out. It’s still gonna be more expensive for HVAC. Your liability insurance is gonna be more expensive. The maintenance costs are gonna be more. HVAC is gonna be more expensive. The real estate triple net pass-through is gonna be more expensive. You actually want the smallest amount of space you can get away with, not the most that you can narrowly afford.

Cool. Question here in the box. Drew asks, “What were the utilization rates you like to see, Mark, compared to total number of classes?” Yep. Thanks, Drew. I would say in general for six on one, we like to see at least 75%, but 80 to even 85%’s probably better. And then Drew, you can access, if you go to your– ’cause you’re a Unicorn Society member, if you go to The Big 5, you can just access the specific numbers broken down by coach-to-client ratio, which is how we think about it.

Yeah, enough said for there. Check that out. The final thing I’ll say, is payroll too high? We like to see this no more than 40 cents on the dollar of total monthly revenue going to non-owner people costs, right? And like I said, we back out the owner [00:35:00] separately from that. The reason this matters is understand if you’re spending 40 cents on your clients or your team, and again, 3 to 4% is going to credit card, you got 25-ish percent less for everything else if you want to stay at 70% or under, right?

Now, I’m not advocating for paying people as little as humanly possible. I’m saying, one, the best gym owners, their payroll’s closer to 30%. This can happen. And two, here’s your secret. It’s not try to get people to work for peanuts. It’s have less people being paid more. It’s not wrong to have a bunch of part-timers.

I understand the case for that. That could be made too. My personal preference for me at this point in my career, I’d rather have less people being paid more so they make a better living and we’re more focused on the business, ’cause another shadow cost, I’ve done this wrong, is it’s a lot easier to manage two and a half people than it is to manage 12 people because every dyad you, you add m- it’s multiplicative the number of opportunities for miscommunication or interpersonal conflict or…

[00:36:00] And I don’t even mean to make it sound like people are, like, fighting all the time in gyms, right? But the reality is it’s more people, it’s more people to manage, right? There were six kids in my family. I imagine it would’ve been different if I was one of, one of two kids, right? Ian, that payroll percentage is we prefer to not see it more than 40%, 45% on the high side.

And I’ll reiterate one more time, listen, if you’re happy with what you’re making, that’s the only thing that really matters, right? So if your payroll’s at 55% and you’re paying 80% and you’re taking home 150K but you feel good about that in your market, that’s fine. Now, arguably, does that mean that maybe your business is harder to run than otherwise it could be?

Maybe, but again, you’re the king and the queen. So ultimately all of these are subjective, but they do give you some benchmarks to shoot for. So what’s one thing you know you can change to improve your gym? So just give me some reflections. I ta- I covered a few things there. What’s one thing you can do based on that convo that would improve how your gym is functioning?

What’s one thing to improve how your gym is functioning? We’re about to move on to delegate, [00:37:00] but before we do that, let’s see here. Harriane says, “Simplify the model. Remove showers.” Yep, sometimes, yep. Tom says, “Decrease rent and operate in a smaller space.” Yep, and again, happy, Thomas, to connect more about how to do that.

I know that seems impossible, but people actually do that all the time. “Assess utilization, possibly trim back. Too much space inefficiencies.” Yep, less options. Yeah, Keisha, yep, I got you, girl. “Maximize space in our current location. Go through, implement, raise your rates.” Yeah, love it. Zoom user. I don’t know who you are, Zoom user, but you’re right.

Okay, we’re moving on to delegate. Okay, so we have to cure a thinking error that says money is tight and good help is hard to find. I’ll just do it myself. Why– I, people, it’s hard to find good help, and they’re, then I have to train them, and they’re gonna do it wrong. I’ll just do it myself I don’t know if you can hear this.

Can you hear this? Say yes if you can hear this. It’s my daughter saying over and over again, “I’m gonna do it myself. I’m gonna do it myself.” You’re like my daughters. You’re like little babies. Thomas asked where to f- [00:38:00] to suggested Raise Your Rates. It actually is, Thomas, in the current Raise Your Rates playbook.

Feel free, let’s… Ping me after on Circle, I can get you that. It’s also, for what it’s worth, in the Big Five assessment. Coop, we have to have other people do some of the things. The biggest mindset shift we can make when we’re moving from a trainer to a CEO or a gym owner, if that feels a little grand for your taste, is trainers spend time to save money, right?

We’re like, “I don’t wanna… I just– I’ll do it myself. It’ll save me money.” But ultimately CEOs, like owners, invest money to buy time. Time is ultimately more valuable than money. Now, this often seems a little bit overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to be. I don’t know if it needs to be every three months, but certainly every 12 months and probably every six months, because invariably stuff just creeps.

Josian probably will be scared. Yeah. Don’t worry, it’s– The truth will set you free, Josian. So here’s the way this works. You have two ways to do this. The easy, less onerous, but not as accurate way is just make a list of everything you do every day and every week, maybe every month. Estimate how long you [00:39:00] spend on it.

This is easier to do. It’ll take you 20, 30 minutes. Not as accurate. The harder but more accurate way to do it, open up a Google tab and track in 15-minute increments everything that happens. Yes, do your personal life. Sure, do sleep. Track everything for five to seven days And then you’ll know actually how long you’re spending on the things.

Then from there… Oh, Thomas did Time Ninja. Yes. Time Ninja. From there, we now want to figure out what we can get off your plate, okay? Here’s the two ways I like to think about this. So the first thing I’ll say is some of you, if you haven’t done this recently, and I hope this is probably the case for those of you that have done it recently, you probably did it and then were like, “Oh, wait, why am I doing that?”

So you don’t even need to usually do a big assessment. But if you wanted to, you could rank everything that you’re doing on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being, “It gives me energy. I could do this all day. I get more energy doing this.” 1 being, “When I do this, I want to wash my face with shards of glass, and I question my will to live.”

And then you [00:40:00] can further combine that with the financial value of the task, right? You could either do the actual hourly rate, be like, “Somebody could do this for $15 or $30.” Or you could do one, two, or $3. So if you needed to do this, and again, some of you won’t even need to. It’ll be obvious, like, I’m like, “Why am I doing that?”

But things that are one and cheap, get them off your plate, right? Because we often feel stuck, but here’s the big idea. Can I give you the big idea? I really want you to zoom in for this. Here’s the big idea. This is always gonna be fractional. You’re not getting 30 hours off your plate next week. You wouldn’t want to do that.

You’re looking for these small wins. You’re looking for 15 minutes a week or 45 minutes a month or maybe something that it takes two hours per week. In most situations, you’re moving bit by bit. The tasks you’re outsourcing are not things that are taking you 10 hours every single week. That’s not the way our businesses shake out.

So you can move this thing off fractionally. Now, where do you find help? If you have existing staff, that can help. Not everybody does. But if you have a team member, certainly if this is somebody that is being [00:41:00] paid salary and has capacity, if they’re the right person, that’s a big if, but if they’re the right person, you can give them things to do, okay?

You might have maybe a trainer that’s not quite full-time or wants more hours. If they’re the right fit for what you need to delegate, maybe you have them do it, and you negotiate either a separate clocking hourly rate, or maybe you pay them a stipend that is reasonable for the role. That’s what we used to do at MFF.

So you might have people on your team that are looking to make more money or have capacity that can get you a few hours back per week, right? We’re not trying to save you 30 hours per week. We’re looking to save you one to two hours per week, and just keep doing that over and over. Bartering, I think, is potentially helpful, arguably underutilized, and possibly perilous.

Your best-case scenario here is a hyper-competent person that wants to train at your gym but can’t afford it and is not going to. So if you hire them, it doesn’t really have a hit on your monthly recurring revenue Because they, they weren’t gonna be hiring you anyway, and [00:42:00] your marginal cost to fulfill the service is just not that high, right?

Once again, if, right? You have to make sure that they’re the right fit. Now admittedly, a lot of the things that are gonna go off your plate first are not requiring a lot of special skill. It’s the whole point. It’s, if you’re familiar with Jim Mar task hierarchy, it’s tier five, which is manual stuff, running errands, unboxing merchandise, putting up holiday decorations, overseeing cleaning, or tier four administrative tasks, which are large digital in nature, are often booking and billing platform stuff with your clients and maybe some light bookkeeping, bill pay, coordinating with your accountant, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay? So They’re not high-skill tasks, but the tricky thing about barter I’ve seen go wrong is there’s this weird thing because they were a client, but now they’re your team member, and that’s just a different relationship. So I think it’s important to know when you do this, they’re crossing the Rubicon.

They’re not a client anymore. They’re a team member, and you really need to lead, manage, and hold them accountable. Again, there shouldn’t be a t- ton of development required for these roles, but they’re still gonna [00:43:00] need love, care, and attention. They’ll still need support for how to get the job done right.

And lucky for you, hold on, hold on, I’m gonna give you a rapid-fire overview of what a good system is in a minute, right? Because I think that’s a key thing for success here. These other– I say these two roles before we get to new staff, virtual assistant, offshore, remote executive assistant. This is somewhat of an artificial binary, but I think of remote help as often offshore, a few bucks an hour, low level, not batteries included, requires a decent bit of training and oversight, gonna mess stuff up from time to time.

There’s a lot of agencies and places where you can find people for very affordable help, but you’re gonna get what you pay for. On the other end, a remote executive assistant, which a lot of you on this call probably should consider, you’re gonna pay a lot more per hour, but they’re gonna be batteries included.

They might need less training. They’ll often be able to just figure out how to do things you don’t know how to do, and they can do things pretty well and consistently and reliably without as much oversight. So this is the type of person I worked with when I owned MFF. In fact, [00:44:00] she still works with Ben at Business Unicorn and still does some stuff for Alloy for Ilana.

And a lot of the owner stuff that you find tedious that you probably don’t want a super low-paid remote person to do, if you don’t have a barter or existing team member do, you can have an executive assistant handle things like run payroll, coordinate bookkeeping, help coordinate taxes stuff, do bill pay, do profit first transfers, right?

Because these are often higher level, more trustworthy people. They can do light HR. So there’s a lot of things that they can help out with that you’d be wise to utilize. And the thing I’ll say about both of those is oftentimes you can get remote help for truly to-the-minute clocked fractional help, so it’s also very efficient because they’ll let you clock in and clock out for the minute.

And then finally, yeah, you can hire new staff. Obviously, when you’re hiring a trainer, it’s usually the way that works, and you usually don’t go from, let’s say, two full-time employees to hiring a third full-time trainer. You usually have to do part-time to full-time. It’s not optimal. It’s not perfect. Just the way that our business works.

Sometimes [00:45:00] you just have to bite the bullet and go to full-time, but that’s also why that’s my least favorite is a full new team member. More typically, I’d prefer you look for barter, give more work to someone you’re already working with, and/or hire some very fractional remote help because, again, a lot of things you need help with are remote.

Now- You might be asking, “But Mark,” or maybe you’re not, “what’s a good system?” Here’s the thing. I, ca- I’m gonna go rapid fire here. Okay? I’m gonna go rapid fire through this, ’cause I still want us to have a little time for growing some Q&A here. But a good system, I think, is very evocatively shown here. On the far left, yeah, it’s in the drawer, that’s good.

The middle drawer, oh, it’s better. We got the knives with the knives and the forks with the forks. The far right is the best, because write this down Write this down. Here’s your big idea. A good system makes it easy to get it right and hard to get it wrong. A good system makes it easy to get it right and hard to get it wrong.

So here are some examples of what this looks like. Again, I’m gonna rapid fire this. Again, University people, you have access to all this anyway. [00:46:00] So here’s a screenshot of the opening checklist, which we hosted on Notion at Mark Fisher Fitness, and a lot of the game is turn things into checklists. That’s a lot of it.

It has to be written down system somewhere or a video system, which we’ll talk about in a minute. And then if you want it done every day or every week or every month, you turn it into a checklist. That can look like a lot of things. They don’t need to be digital, by the way. You could have a front desk opening/closing checklist that’s laminated with a dry erase marker, but we want checklists, right?

And you’ll see this both has a list of what to do, and every day they can fill it out, and that’s an advantage of a digital one is every day there’s a fresh sheet to fill out to click the things to make sure they’re getting done. Trainer audits. Say yes if you have a trainer audit, and no or not yet. Say not yet if not , okay?

Hope- hopefully this is most of us. If not, yet, I’m gonna write this down. I just wanna highlight that a trainer audit is a checklist, right? You have a standard operating procedure. Awesome. You’re gonna get it. You’re gonna get it, Nathan. Yep. Standard operating procedure that needs to be turned into a checklist so that we can audit the session for [00:47:00] quality control.

Again, that’s why I don’t love offering nine things, because you’re gonna need this for every service you have. It’d be better to do a few things or one thing even very well because you need the system of oversight. So I’m not prescribing what you see here on the slide. It should be what makes sense for you.

Again, University members, you can use this as a template, but even there you’re gonna wanna adapt it for your beliefs, your standards, what you want to have happen. Digital forms, I think, are another important kind of system, right? So in the beginning, if you look on the right, that’s Mark Fisher Fitness’s termination form.

In the beginning, you can handle a freeze request via text message. Eventually, if you want scale and you wanna really outsource this stuff and make sure things aren’t getting lost, you’ll probably want some kind of digital form so you’re making sure you’re getting all the information you need, so you can clarify when they fill it out how long notice they need to give.

They’ll get a confirmation email. It gets sorted digitally, so eventually we’re gonna want forms for a lot of stuff we do in the business. Videos also are very important. If you have a booking and billing platform, unlike [00:48:00] Kilo, that is a little bit Byzantine and confusing, the reality is there’s only so many things somebody needs to know.

So if you’re working with anybody else helping you do any of this, and I hope you’re not literally doing it all yourself all the time, having some screenshots and some videos can be helpful. And in the age of AI, videos and screenshots can even be turned into checklists and written SOPs. But sometimes it’s helpful to watch a video, and a short video also allows you to do whatever it is you’re doing and just screen capture it and then have somebody else turn it into an SOP Here’s examples of visual templates on the right side there.

These are the how we put away the bars at Mark Fisher Fitness, right? See, it’s pretty clear there, right? Hard to mess it up even if you’re new. And then finally, the ultimate task list. Unicorn Society members are probably sick of me talking about this. Alicia, is this, this might be yours, Alicia. Is this the Lean Strong one maybe?

You’ll see this one is super meta, right? Because this is if you have somebody doing a lot of things that are not in time, they have a bunch of things they have to do every day or every month, this is really meta because part of the SOP [00:49:00] is film more videos, keep updating the SOPs, right? You can also look at the individual documents or checklists if need, if there’s other digital documents that go with these things.

But I love having a master one of this. This is super helpful if you have a number two or a GM. And then once again, it’s just a set of checklists, right? Very hard to get it wrong because if they’re using this every day, you’re not gonna mess it up. And just in case you think you or your team are too good for checklists, I don’t know.

There’s a reason that surgeons and pilots use checklists. So let us… Thanks, Lauren. Lets us go to what’s one thing you’d get off your plate? What’s one thing you’d get off your plate? And then I’m gonna cover some growth stuff. What’s one thing you can get off your plate? I hope we, we jogged your brain, got you excited about something you’re gonna stop doing.

Said, “Yep, Drew, small group coaching.” Yep, and for a lot of you that, that’s the thing, right? And that’s usually, that starts to get nice when you’ve already off-board some of it and you know the system for doing it. Alicia’s gonna do some more admin stuff. Yep, I love it. What else? What are other things you know of right now?

You’re like, “Ah, I c- I [00:50:00] can have somebody else handle that.” Give me some more answers and unlock the next section. Brian, follow up, reach out. Yep. Yeah, and listen, follow up is d- definitely a higher level, but I’ll tell you what, executive assistants, there’s some people in the Unicorn Society doing that.

That’s a great example of somebody that, that’s a little higher skill, but that’s not impossible to train if you find the right person. Terminations, pauses, versus not training all sessions. Love it. Some lead follow up. All right, team, I’m loving it. Okay, here is Dylan. Now, here’s an important distinction.

Two things. First of all, Dylan also has twins. I don’t know what’s going on here. I think it’s because I have a twin. So I must warn you, everyone in the Unicorn Society now or in the future, you might have twins if you join. A couple cool things about Dylan. So Dylan has worked with us for a couple years, and we were unpacking…

Now again, certainly his income has increased. He’s doubled revenue. Impact has increased. Doubled clients. Most impressively, he took paternity leave off and is stress-free, which is usually not words that go together, and he’s still on pace to grow by 35% this year, okay? So here’s the distinction that’s hidden [00:51:00] in this, because I was like trying to unpack with Dylan, “Okay, what did you do?

What did you do?” Right? Because that’s a lot of my job. What happened? Why did this work? So one of the things he talked about, particularly on the growth front, because leads are the thing a lot of us need, is he mentioned that before he worked with us, he was growing, but it was a little bit more like trickling, a little less proactive.

He started working with us, and then he started doing proactive things to grow the business, right? If we were in person, I’d said, “Raise your hand if you want to grow your business,” right? You all raise your hands, okay? Here’s the thing I think about more and more, spending time with the best gym owners in the world.

The operators are inheriting the earth, because sales and marketing is just another set of systems. So think about in this next section, that last section, about particularly if you want other people to help or if you just want to make sure you are accountable, because I’m looking at today mostly the lens of how am I making sure that you as the owner are doing the thing, because you have primary responsibility for making it rain.

How do we turn your marketing and sales activities into systems, right? Let’s talk about this a little bit more Okay, Thomas wants twins. Great. Yeah, sign up for [00:52:00] Unicorn’s Eyes today and get twins. Okay, so this is the weekly growth engine. This is the high level system, okay? So first, and by the way, this sounds so simple to be stupid, but follow me on this ’cause I promise it’s likely many of you are not doing this yet, though I do love you.

Choose the marketing activities. Not an unlimited number of things we should be doing each week. You’re gonna be doing probably least three to four to five, probably no more than seven, so you choose the things you’re gonna do, and I’ll give you a list in a minute here. You decide realistic how much time can you spend.

I feel like it’s gotta be, like, five to at least 10 if you really wanna grow a lot. I’m sorry to say that. I did a workshop two years ago, and I liked the name. It was like, “Grow Your Gym in Three to Five Hours Per Week,” and I think you will grow your gym, but it’s gonna be painfully slow. Most of you need more time if you’re on the floor a ton.

See the last section. That’s why I chose to start with delegate. Some of you need to free up time for these lower level things to focus more on marketing and sales, okay? Then you wanna make a daily schedule, right? So let’s say realistically you’re like, “Okay, I can spend, I don’t know, 12 hours per week on [00:53:00] generating leads, following up with leads, sales,” right?

‘Cause it’s not just marketing, it’s also sales stuff. Then it becomes a daily schedule. This is the thing that I often see goes wrong because ultimately this needs to exist in our calendar the way client sessions would, right? I’m doing this from this time to this time on Monday, et cetera, et cetera, and I’m gonna show you an example of this to visualize it.

Then we need to do this thing. We must show integrity and keep your schedule I love you. And maybe n- maybe this is not an issue for any of you, but sometimes, not you gym owners on the call, but some gym owners, they do everything right. They have the activities, they have the schedule, and then they just kinda get around to not doing it because a fire comes up, and oftentimes they’re just not managing their day and their schedule.

And this’ll get you, right? Because you would never not get around to training a client session. You’d never be like, “Oh, I just… I just, things came up. I didn’t get around to teaching that class,” right? You need to treat your marketing activities and commitments the way you would treat a commitment to train a session.

And then ultimately we do have to [00:54:00] track some stuff. We do have to track some stuff, okay? Ultimately, we have to track some stuff because here’s the other thing. If we’re doing these activities, that’s all well and good, but we’re not confusing activity with achievement. I think you need to give things probably about a month, and never give things more than two months.

If you’re tracking stuff, and I’ll show you some suggestions for what to track, and the needle’s not moving, there’s three things that happen. One, we’re either not doing the right things. Two, we’re not doing the right volume. Or three, we’re not doing them well. And admittedly, sometimes it’s hard on your own.

That’s why it’s nice to talk to an outside person like a Bizfeed Unicorns coach. But if you’re doing this on your own, y- you wanna work that checklist, right? And the good news is you’re probably spending enough time hopefully. Hopefully from this I’m giving you some sense of the right activities, but there’s always gonna be a little bit of testing, and the ghost in the machine is, like, how well we’re executing, okay?

So do this real quick, ’cause I’ve talked about this elsewhere. But understand all of marketing is a process where you take somebody from not knowing you exist [00:55:00] to knowing you exist. And yes, then they have to like, and trust, and hire you, and you make offers, and they find you credible. A whole different convo we’re not talking about today.

Today I’m just saying the obvious thing is they can’t hire you if they’ve never heard of you. So the two different buckets of this. One, there’s buckets. They’re activities that are used when a prospect is looking for a gym. I call these fishing nets. So you got a little fishing net, and the fishies are looking around.

The fishies are, “I want a gym. I want a gym.” And you got fishing nets. And then you have a different set of systems that are fishing poles when the gym is looking for prospects. The fishies are not necessarily looking for a gym, but if they see the right kind of bait, they might be like, “Maybe I do wanna eat that worm,” okay?

So if you need more, I think almost everyone on this call probably has this, but as a reminder, free download, gymmarketingsecretsbook.com. It’s less than a 30-minute read. I th- And again, this is the proof in the pudding there. I think there’s only 20 things on there. There’s not an unlimited number of things you can do to grow a brick-and-mortar gym.

You [00:56:00] probably wanna do more than one, but you also probably don’t wanna do more than five to seven. Okily dokily. So prospect’s looking for a gym. What do you do when you are looking for a vendor? If you’re looking for a plumber, or you’re looking for a gym. You’re h- you’re gonna hire a trainer. What do you do?

Google you. Yep, and ask a friend. Yep, and maybe check reviews. That’s true, Jeremy. I would say that probably is part of the Google you. And specifically in 2025, as we all know, we zoom out to, they do online search. They search gyms or personal trainers, often with town or best, like best gym near me, best personal trainer in town of such and such.

And the three places they’re gonna search are Google Maps, maybe Apple Maps, usually Google Maps, or chatbots. The chatbots, the robots are here, friends. The good news is the three digital homes are gonna help you show up in all of these. So your three digital homes are we want a website that is designed well, and loading well is important.

That’s why I like vendors like Kilo that make sure technically it’s loading well. The website [00:57:00] should make it immediately clear the type of person you help, the outcomes you create, and exactly what they should do next. A lot I could say about this, but we need a good website because if I put 1,000 people to your website and they don’t know that you’re for them or how you help them or what to do, that ain’t great.

Then we need a Google Business Profile that’s updated. Can I give you a micro pro tip that even advanced gym owners don’t always know? May I give you a micro pro tip? This needs to be updated regularly Which is to say we need to be getting Google reviews regularly. Ideally, we’re posting on there maybe once a week.

Please make sure your address, phone number is the same as your website, otherwise that will get you dinged. In general, Google reviews seem to be a big piece. It’s early innings, but seem to be a big piece, by the way, of how AI answers queries for this sort of product. And then your Instagram profile, I think you should post there some.

I think posting there is mostly overrated, but the profile itself, you need to look like the lights are on, and it needs to be immediately clear, just like the website, probably the same exact verbiage, the type of person you help, the results you create, [00:58:00] exactly what to do next, right? So if the fishies are looking and they’re looking on the interwebs, they can find you.

And then when they ask friends, all of our clients should be well-trained, well-trained to have a evergreen referral offer that is an easy and obvious way for a friend to get started. So if a friend asks over a coffee date, “How you liking the gym? I– Should I go there? Are you like– What– How do I get started?”

They’re like, “Oh, at my gym, this is what you do, and if you do it, you’ll get this thing,” right? And then, yes, we incentivize the client, but that doesn’t drive behavior. It’s just a way of systemizing a thank you, right? So the mere existence of the evergreen offer will not drive behaviors. But if you ask for the referral at point of sale, during goal review check-ins, maybe you do an email reminder every six months to all your clients, just keep reminding people it exists because they’re gonna forget, then it will stay top of mind for them, and we like that, right?

But it won’t drive behavior in and of itself. But we just need to make sure that if a friend asks your client, that they have an obvious and easy way to get started. Now, if I’m looking for [00:59:00] prospects, I think of three buckets for tier one, and one of them is referral asks again. But this is a different kind of referral ask.

The first one is a referral fishing net. It’s always available, and it’s there designed to catch the fishy if a friend’s, if a client’s friend mentions looking for a gym That this will inspire your clients to think of and go out and ask their friends. Ones I love here are bring-a-buddy weeks, free month for a friend with a claim by, a start by date.

I think lead or community events can sometimes be a lead generator that’s time-sensitive because it’s happening at a time. Give to get contests. So the key thing here is this is a time-sensitive one that gives an urgent incentive to take action. Paid meta ads, I think for a mature gyms at a certain point, you’re probably gonna have to unfortunately pay the Zuckerberg tax, which I don’t love it.

But the reality is if you want the higher amount of volume as you’re really looking to grow the gym, you’re gonna probably wanna consider that it’s a different kind of lead. If you’ve never run them, they’re gonna be colder. You will need more time and [01:00:00] capacity to follow up. They’ll be harder to get to take the next action because they’re just less bought in, but it’s still some it’s gonna make sense for most gyms at a certain point.

But one, not everybody needs to start there, and most of you shouldn’t. Most of you can scale up a little bit before you really need that. And two, there are gym owners, Licia among them, by the way, that don’t even use an ad vendor. So Biz For Unicorns members, we should thank Licia if you’ve not checked out the playbook that she made, the massive playbook.

So you can learn how to do this. Some gym owners do it. Maybe you hire your executive assistant or you ask your GM, like Licia, to figure out how to do it. A lot of– more typically gym owners do use I Love Gym Member Machine. I use them in my gyms. But at a certain point, you’ll probably wanna consider meta ads.

And then lastly, business partnerships. So a lot I could say about this here. Again, I don’t have time to go into all the hows, but the what is these are the three things you wanna do. Business partnerships, I’ll just say you wanna start by trying to be helpful to the other business. You wanna have a clear ask, like maybe a raffle for a free month, and you need to do more volume than you think is fair.

It’s probably not [01:01:00] gonna work if you only talk to three businesses. You might need to talk to 20. You might need to talk to 50. So it’s a little high risk, high return because you’re gonna goose egg a lot. But when this works, it can really gush some new lead oil. Now, not talking about any of these here, I just wanna make a point that, yeah, the– I– listen, if I don’t know anything about your gym or your skills or your budget or your market, the first three are what I’m bringing to my island because in general, they’re gonna have the best bang for your buck for time and energy invested.

These other items here I think are also worth testing, and they might outperform the first three in some markets some of the time, but they’re usually not gonna be the first ones I’m gonna go to. Marketing is another word for test. Test them all. Okay, so this is an example of what the three and a half hour per week one looks like, which I don’t love.

It’s– I guess you can follow up every other day if you had to. If you’re on the floor 40 hours per week, if this is all you had, you could do it. But let’s go back to delegate, get off the floor, right? Don’t be on the floor 40 hours per week, and let’s shoot for 10 to– And again, if you really [01:02:00] wanna grow, if your focus is to grow the gym- Within reason, the more the merrier, right?

You’re gonna grow more with t- 10 hours, you’ll grow more with 20 hours, right? Now, there’s gonna be a higher… There’s gonna be probably diminishing returns, and in practice, as the gym owner, there’s gonna be other stuff you need to do, right? You’re not gonna be spending probably 50 hours just on marketing and sales.

And further, perversely, by the time you really scale up, you’re gonna have some help. So I almost deleted this slide, but I realized depending on where you’re at, this might be where you have to start. I think it’s okay, but honestly, I’d rather you just… You’re just gonna sleep an hour less. I love you. For three months, you’re gonna sleep one hour less.

Sorry, life. You can do this. I believe in you. It’s only three months. We’ll get… You’ll, you’ll get that sleep debt back, right? So let’s s- let’s get more time for this. This is what a more robust one looks like. And remember, this is just the first step. This ultimately needs to go in your calendar and scheduled time blocks.

So this shows you a hypothetical list of those things that you might do, but ultimately, this is gonna have to go [01:03:00] in the… Whether you use literal GCal or you write in your calendar, doesn’t matter. The key thing is you have to schedule those time blocks. This is where we see the intersection with Time Ninja, which Thomas just did recently.

Travis, how you get the sleep back, you kinda don’t, right? But ultimately the reality is for most of us, you can… Yeah, it depends on how many hours you’re sleeping, right? There’s probably a bigger conversation to be had if we’re truly working 60 hours per week and not able to get to the marketing, and we’re only sleeping five hours per night.

It’s probably a different conversation. Travis, maybe we’ll chat later today. We can chat about that. You know, you can accrue slum- some sleep debt and then get some back over the weekend. It’s not optimal, right? No doubt about it. But depending on where we’re at, sometimes it’s necessary and I, I s- I understand Travis.

That, I understand mostly that was in jest. Most of that was a joke. So okay, so this is the last slide I wanna show you quickly. Again, Unicorn timers, you have this. But basically, we wanna track, if nothing else, number of leads, number of low barrier offers engaged or sold, depending on your play, number of strategy sessions, of sales, sales [01:04:00] offers, and then new members.

We want to track this weekly and monthly. So there’s some other stuff on there, but for now I wouldn’t worry about that. But you want to track weekly and monthly, ’cause remember, if you’re doing something for a month and these numbers aren’t moving, we’re either doing the wrong stuff, we’re not spending enough time on it, or we’re not doing them well.

Melanie asks, “Do you track by time blocking your schedule or Google Calendar?” I don’t personally, but I have seen people do that really well. What I do, this is hilarious. Actually, you can see a version of it here. This is… It’s probably a little hard to see. I tend to block out the second half of my day because it’s meetings.

The first part of my day, the night before, Time Ninja friends you’ll know the strategy. And by the way, everyone here has Time Ninja because if you bought the course or are a Unicorn Society member, you have access. I tend to, the night before when I’m doing my shutdown ritual, prepare the next day. I will, in some cases, in 15-minute increments etch out my entire morning.

That might be a little bit more reactive than some of you will benefit from, so some of you might be better off just making repeating appointments in your Google Calendar. Just kind of depends on your relationship with that. [01:05:00] So I don’t personally do it, Melanie, but it wouldn’t be wrong, and for some of you it would actually be a great strategy.

Okily dokily. All right, so we’re about to open up for Q&A here in a minute. What’s one upgrade to your growth strategy? Based on things we talked about today, what’s one thing you could do differently that would improve your growth results? Which is to say, increase your number of leads and clients. Talked about a lot of things.

We talked about different marketing activities, talked about some marketing time management stuff. We talked about marketing as a system. We talked about tracking things, right? We talked about acknowledging that we’re not always doing the thing we say we’re gonna do, right? So for… Bruce says, “More time.”

Yep. Drew says, “Stick to the schedule,” right? Follow the done for you calendar, right? Jeremy, “Implement the weekly growth machine.” Alicia says, “Hire an executive assistant so I can do more marketing.” Yes. Ben, thanks. Yes. Travis says, “Up- upping time commitment on marketing and better ac- tracking of actions.” I love it.

I love it. Any questions or anything unclear? Any clarifying questions? Can [01:06:00] I help you understand how to move forward with any of the things we talked about? Drew says, “Getting time back, pulling off the training floor, 100 SGPT members, average number of clients.” Yeah, Drew, again, obviously we can touch base about this.

Thanks, Melise. Melanie writes… Oh, great question. “What type content of paid meta ads would you suggest?” So in general, Melanie, I like, I don’t know, in 2025, I like a direct to offer. So this is Unicorn Society people, let me give you a little bit of an update here. Thanks, Lauren. Yeah, great, this is a great question.

A little bit of an update here. So in general, all of marketing is a process of I don’t know you exist, I know you, I like you and I trust you, I hire you. I think n- liking and trusting still matters, but with a brick-and-mortar small business, the reality is it- y- there’s already some credibility built in if you look reasonable.

So you can often go no higher, right? And that happens all the time, right? People, everyone on this call has had paid ads. You’ve run the ad, the person hops on a call, they move into a session, and [01:07:00] they buy a membership. Maybe not 70% of them, but a, a meaningful percentage enough that can work. So the content for paid ads for most of you most of the time is gonna be some kinda direct-to-offer in…

I generally prefer this to be a general thing. You’re not even specific about the offer. You’re selling the benefits, the features. You’re showing creative that is pictures of clients that are aspirational and relatable, that look like what your avatar might want to look like but feels achievable to them And you’re driving them to, in most cases, get on a quick 10-minute phone call where you then sell the next thing, which depending on your model might be a membership, but more typically is gonna sell them to come in for a free or paid strategy session and a free or paid first thing, which might be a, two free workouts or my favorite is two weeks of unlimited training for $99, right?

And I’d like to usually sell that on the call, ’cause if they buy the thing on the call, they’re likely to show up and keep moving. But admittedly, it’s a little bit easier if you just wanna sell them a free [01:08:00] thing of come in for another conversation, okay? So that’s what I tend to prefer. I would say this, more advanced peeps…

Two things. Reminder, Unicorn Society people, don’t forget, Alicia made that amazing playbook for you. I would say more advanced peeps, listen, there is a time and a place for some content ads, right? There’s a time and a place for running a layer of testimonial ads that you retarget people that engage but didn’t come in, so they’re seeing case studies and stories of people that are aspirational and relatable.

But for most of you most of the time, I’d say just keep it simple. We’re just trying to drive them to get on the phone. And then the other thing to remember is once we’ve got that contact, the last thing I’ll say, particularly if you’re using a marketing calendar like we use in the Unicorn Society, you don’t have to think about it, ’cause every four to eight weeks you’re just going back with an offer.

And if they don’t go through that first time because life happens, which happens, you’re just gonna continue to gently, persistently make them invitations to come in for the next thing. Awesome. Thank you so much. Great. Moving along here. Thanks, Chris. Brian says, “What would a baseline amount to spend on Google FB ads to make it worth and [01:09:00] see some sort of return?”

That’s a great question, Brian. I think in general it’s gonna be at least 1,000 to 1,500. Depends a little bit on the market. But usually 1,000 to 1,500. Yeah, I, I have a question my own thinking on that. I probably wanna double check like an ad veteran does of all time. But I think in general, the sort of cliche knee-jerk thing for a mature gym is like about three grand per month plus vendor fees if you’re using a vendor.

You usually can’t spend more than five grand per month. It doesn’t scale up and definitely at a certain point just your cost per leads start to go up. In any given market there’s a finite number of people. So that’s my very qualified answer, Brian. Travis asks, “What’s a reasonable amount of time for staff to be filling out checklist SOPs?”

That’s a good question. I don’t know that I have one offhand. Ideally it’s integrated into their job, but I don’t know. Ideally, like filling out checklists should be like I don’t know, five to 10 minutes. Even Travis, I know your model, but if you have a director of training, even if they’ve got one as robust as that list that Ben gave to Alicia, there’s not that many things on there so they can go through it.

[01:10:00] And I’ll say this, even very advanced people, like my director of training, Travis, I think you’ve heard me talk before about Alana. She used that when it was onboarding. We moved away from it because it just felt like it just wasn’t ultimately necessary for her because she’s very unusually dialed, but she’s an unusually sophisticated operator.

Th- the reality is, remember, checklist– surgeons and pilots have checklists, and now less people die in planes and surgeries. So I kinda think everybody, honestly as owners, you probably should have a checklist too, right? Like it’s maybe a little extreme, but I don’t know, maybe not. So the amount of time filling it out, I’m not sure, but I mean, it really shouldn’t be more than five to 10 minutes if it’s a checklist.

If they have to look in the SOP, but that’s a different animal. That means they’re not trained yet, right? They don’t know how to do it, and then they have to spend that time anyway because they don’t know how to do the thing. But for the most part, just yep, “Oh, I didn’t do my five tasks on the end of my shift.”

Yep, right? So it shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t take too long in theory. Zoom user asks, Unicorn Sided goes deeper into this, but w- what do you like to offer joint ventures? Free training for a few of their clients and employees. Aha, thank you Zoom user. You can offer this, and they don’t [01:11:00] care for the most part if it’s nice to offer.

They want your money. So if nothing else, buy their things when you can. It’s a business expense if it’s a joint venture kind of thing. You, they, you wanna offer them the opportunity to potentially give away a sampling of their services to your members. Like they’re mostly looking to make money. It’s not wrong to offer them your service.

I think you can do that. But I think a thing that really doesn’t work well is like a lifetime discount for your clients. First of all, we’re just hurting our margin, number one, and number two, they, they don’t necessarily care. Now listen, I don’t think it’s wrong to give a free trial to the owner, or like I think that’s a good idea, right?

That’s not… Particularly if you’re actually, you’re dealing with like healthcare workers, like chiros, PTs, and you’re good at what you do. Sometimes that can really establish your authority. But for the most part, you wanna find a way to make them money, which is usually exposure to your clientele and/or your audience.

Great question. Okay, let’s see here Brian D following up Brian’s question. “Do you think it’s worth it to spend on social [01:12:00] media ads just to increase awareness but not necessarily make immediate sales?” Usually no. Yeah, usually almost never would I do like brand awareness, ’cause you’re already getting brand awareness with the direct offer, which ideally is not like a hard pressure-y direct offer.

It’s, “Hey, are you this kind of person and you feeling this kind of way that you don’t wanna feel? What if you felt like this or what if you had these kinds of results? That’s exactly what we do, and we have space for five men and women. Do ba, ba, ba, ba.” Right? ‘Cause for the most part, like that’s a great way to get brand awareness, and it’s a little more of a direct path.

That’s why most people have moved away from these like very elaborate like lead magnets where it’s, “Get my 10 paleo keto breakfast recipes.” It’s just like a less direct path, right? So again, not strictly wrong. You could do some sponsored posts sometimes, but mostly it would be better just to spend the money to get the contact.

Any other questions? We have time for maybe one more. If we got one more rapid fire. Is there like a formula that you have in gyms to figure out how much offering in terms of like how many [01:13:00] classes per week or- Yes … sessions per week given the amount of members that your- Yes … goal is? Okay. Yes. Yes. So I just wanna acknowledge Thomas.

Yes. Twins table the next retreat. Good idea. Good idea, Thomas. We must spread our progeny. Okay, so last question here. Great question, Drew. So the formula we think about is this, right? Because you can always figure out how many clients you have based on their frequency, right? You can figure out like how many sessions would you be on the hook if you had 100% utilization with no breakage, right?

So just keep the math real simple. Let’s say you do six on one. You have 60 clients. They train two times per week. That’s 120 sessions you’re on the hook for, and since you can do six at a time, that’s 20 sessions you’re on the hook for if you had perfect utilization and no breakage Now, the downside there is you’re not gonna have a lot of wiggle room.

You usually need to have a little bit of a buffer for people to move around, but you also ne- always have breakage, right? We all know in a given month, we wish it was otherwise, but people are never gonna use every session [01:14:00] they buy. So at a six-on-one, oftentimes it’s pretty close to one. So if you owe 30 sessions per week, if you offer 30 sessions per week, you’ll usually wind up at 85-ish percent, which is about where you wanna be.

Now again, uh, here’s another perverse thing. You probably do wanna get some periodic complaints and, dare I say it, even terminations about not having enough availability, or it probably means you’re leaving a little too much availability. I would also note vibe fit matters here too, so we do have slightly different standards, for instance, in large group versus small group.

Large group is interesting in that because of the coach-to-client ratio, on the one hand, in theory, you could probably get by with maybe more like 70% utilization, maybe even 65%. Why do I say that? All right, if you have, hypothetically, let’s say I’m not– I assume it’s not most of your models, but let’s say you’re selling a 25 on one.

It’s like a boot camp style thing. It’s a party. Okay, well, you might say, “Look, first of all, my coach-to-client ratio is, like, good. My profitability for the cost of that one coach to handle, even for the decreased session price, [01:15:00] we are at 15 clients. I am very happy,” okay? All right, maybe you say 65%. I would say the classes have also an experience that you need to be more attuned to.

A small group personal training, I will say from the experience, and you all know this if you’ve done six-on-one, like two to three people at a time, it for some clients would probably prefer that to six-on-one, right? Because it’s a more, like, customized, you have more time to ask questions, get into technical coaching, ask them about, connect with them as a human.

A class, there is an experiential thing that’s a little bit harder to put your finger on because at a certain point, classes really run the risk of being the empty restaurant, right? Because now if you have that 25-person class, you might say, okay, and again, it depends on the way the space is set up, the exercises you do, how it’s structured.

You might say, “Okay, this is profitable at 15 people, but it feels a little bit embarrassing here. It’s not a vibe.” It’s probably not a good example. Fifteen on 25 probably feels okay, but I bet if you have eight people, maybe it’s still pretty profitable because you just are great at [01:16:00] sales and people are spending 30 bucks per class and you’re like, “Wow, these numbers are really working.

But man, this feels like a sad, embarrassing, wet fart of a thing.” So that has to be factored in as well. So at any rate, I’ll pull up there. Drew, as a reminder, if you go into the big five assessments, you’ll find it in there. And of course, anybody wants to hit me up on Circle, I’m happy to advise based on your coach-to-client ratio because it, again, it does move around if it’s a four-on-one, a six-on-one, a 15-on-one, et cetera, et cetera.

All right, friends. We’re at time. Thank you all so much. This was so fun. I appreciate you coming and hanging out with me. Thank you as always for giving me this opportunity to talk about this thing I care so much about, and for believing me enough to spend an hour and a half of your time with [01:17:00] me.