Mike Warkentin (00:02):
A gym with a huge number of clients. It sounds great, right? Multiply clients by average revenue per member, keep growing steadily, yada, yada, yada, buy a yacht, retire like a crypto baron—except it almost never happens like that. My gym reached about 230 clients before we slid backward big time. And I’m not alone. This happens all the time when growth strains a gym’s systems. My guest today went from 100 members to about 270 members really fast, and now he’s comfortable in the 160 to 200 range. I’m going to work him for info on stable growth and to find out what the right number of clients is because more isn’t always better. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I’m your host, Mike Warkentin. Please hit “subscribe” so you don’t miss a single episode because we’re committed to helping you run a better business on this show. Now, Kieran O’Dwyer, Two-Brain mentor. He runs Bathurst Strength and Conditioning and Orange City S&C. He’s in Australia. It is an ungodly hour down under right now, but he’s here to help you run a better business. Kieran, have you slept tonight?
Kieran O’Dwyer (00:58):
Just a little bit, Mike. Just a little bit.
Mike Warkentin (01:01):
And I’m making jokes. I know you just got off office hours where you’re helping Two-Brain business clients with marketing. I really appreciate you staying up a little bit extra before you start your official day. So, thank you very much for being here. We’re going to talk members, and I know you’ve got a great story, so I’m going to get right into it. You started small, got big really, really fast.[1] What were you unprepared for when you almost tripled your client count?
Kieran O’Dwyer (01:22):
Yeah, man. So, the three things that we were mostly unprepared for were administration, member correspondence, retention, and love, 100%. And then also what a lot of people forget is general maintenance and upkeep of a facility when you have so many people coming through daily, the sheer hours needed for that, and then also replacing things. That was terrible when we got to 270.
Mike Warkentin (01:51):
Yep. And I’ll give you my basic example. Toilet paper—all of a sudden, you’re always out of toilet paper every single day, right? And it is just like a function of having more people in the business, but that’s just a very small example of what happens to the entire system, right? You talked about retention, like when your retention started to suffer with larger members, did you start to get really afraid?
Kieran O’Dwyer (02:11):
Well, maybe not, quickly enough, but yes. You just think—because you get stuck in this cycle of more members, more people[2] —so you’re like, “Oh, I can just get more people. I’ll do the challenges. I’ll do the free membership giveaways.” All the things that I did to kind of get these, I would say, lower quality leads in the gym—before Two-Brain, obviously—you just kind of get in that cycle, and yeah, retention had a huge hit, and I didn’t realize until it was like on the way down really quickly, and to touch on it, that administration was a huge part of it because membership handling, enforcing policies, and in order to get people to that number mark—270 is huge—we had a very small onboarding, like two PTs.
Kieran O’Dwyer (03:04):
And we only enforced it like 50% of the time if they had experience, so even things like getting people on board with how the gym runs and having to talk to people and helping put memberships on hold—even those little things across the board, dude, it was a lot to keep up with, that’s for sure. Because we were focused on all that, we forgot the service, which is not just the coaching, but it’s the personalized attention. It’s making them feel like they have a home away from home, you know?
Mike Warkentin (03:38):
Yeah. We didn’t grow as fast as you did. What was the timelines there from 100 to 270? That was COVID, right?
Kieran O’Dwyer (03:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was, it was just under 100 during COVID, before COVID. And obviously all that happened. Yeah, just under 100. And then after COVID, because everybody started to like health again—that’s a whole other thing—yeah, because they started to get back on the bandwagon, they—and we put a lot of marketing measures in place, maybe not the same ones that I would enforce now, but we put a lot of that, so it was awesome. We just boomed and boomed and boomed. But there were a lot of discounts in there as well. A lot of little trial things, like discounts across the board: students, families, what else? Oh yeah, firefighters, all that kind of stuff and all that. We were getting heaps of members and paid-in-fulls with 20% discount grandfathering. We were getting heaps. And then the profit was like—where was that?
Mike Warkentin (04:41):
What profit?
Kieran O’Dwyer (04:43):
Yeah, man. Because especially the sheer amount of personal effort from the leader to handle that is quite insane for that many members in a year or two.
Mike Warkentin (04:55):
Yeah, we grew much slower than that, but it still was just getting bigger, getting bigger, getting bigger, and then all of a sudden, just cracks started happening, and then all of a sudden, everything disintegrated, and we didn’t get into a really bad spot for a little bit. It took us a while, but we lost—I think in one month we lost like 30 or something members, like a large number. And that was troublesome, and then we weren’t able to put them back. We bled out more members, and all of a sudden, we were losing about $5,000 a month, and I was panicked. And that’s when I started to talk to Chris Cooper and get into Two-Brain, because I knew I was in major, major trouble. And it was almost for the exact same reasons that happened to you. I didn’t grow as big as fast, but I still reached this number that was larger than my systems could handle, and I was in big trouble. Is it fair to say that your systems got completely overwhelmed when you hit 270?
Kieran O’Dwyer (05:37):
Not only fair, that’s 100% correct. Completely overwhelmed. And because most of the revenue was like above 90% group as well, there wasn’t a profit margin that you’d get from like PT where it’s very fixed because the amount of administration, like we talked about, to handle everything—I didn’t have a management layer either for that many people. I just had me and then my coaches.
Mike Warkentin (06:02):
So, you’ve got retention problems that are caused by this. You’ve got admin problem; you’re probably not billing people on time, missing things. You’ve got discounts; you said you’ve got maintenance and just general upkeep problems. You’ve got all this stuff going on, and you’re without a mentor at this point, you said. So how did this affect you personally? Like, were you scrambling for staff and patching leaks all day? Like, were you just up longer than you are now just freaking out?
Kieran O’Dwyer (06:24):
Yes. Yes. So, we were doing well. I was at the gym all the time. Because there weren’t systems and leadership especially, it was still on me to push. So, I’d be here in the morning and the afternoon just before I got with Peter, my Two-Brain mentor, and one of the things I remember happening was that we were in this cycle of: Our classes were filling out, so we needed more equipment, right? And we had two assault bikes break because if you have like 30 seconds max effort on an assault bike for eight classes a day, man, that just tears them apart. So, we’d have the handles all loose, we’d have the pedals fall off, and we got stuck in this cycle where we’d be like, “Our answer is just to buy more, and buy more assault bikes so we can have more classes,” or stuff like that. But because there wasn’t money in the account for that, we’re like, “Nah, there’s something wrong.”
Mike Warkentin (07:19):
So were you stressed?
Kieran O’Dwyer (07:20):
Yeah, totally. 100%. Because it was also—to take a quick step back, because we didn’t have a slower onboarding process or a slower personal training process where you control the flow, we didn’t have very strong sales. It was just like: Ring them, get them in quickly as you can at all times of the day no matter what. That was it. And because we didn’t have those processes, it was extremely reactive. And because we knew that people were going to leave like that because there was no guarantee that they would stay, we would then panic, and we would be doing stuff—like I was doing stuff on a Sunday and a Saturday because it was so important that I get them in to maintain this number. That was everything. So, I remember doing stuff on a Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. anyways just talking to them, like it wasn’t even like at NSI; it was just like, “Oh, hey, I’m free on Saturday. Can we just talk about your memberships?” Or a Sunday. Yeah.
Mike Warkentin (08:17):
This is so common. And back in the day when I started running a gym in 2011 kind of thing, the big plan was: Get a ton of members, run a big gym, fill your group classes, make a bunch of money, and almost no one did it. There were a very few people who did it, and most of them got very frazzled; a lot of other people slid backward. There’s very few that are running great big gyms. And Sara Snellman, one of our mentors, she runs a model like this. She’s got 341 clients over in Switzerland. Excellent retention. She loses 10 per month. But this is a like—she’s a unicorn. I wrote an article about this—like, she doesn’t exist very often in the world. This model is mostly unsustainable, and and I are proof of that, but for people who are out there, just know that chasing more clients for the sake of more clients is not the best plan because your systems are going to implode unless you are excellent with systems, and most people aren’t, especially business systems because you don’t know how to build them.
Mike Warkentin (09:13):
So here’s the thing: Chris Cooper, I talked to him the other week, and he said to me, “No one scales retention as they grow.” So, you bought more equipment; you scaled up your equipment. I hired more coaches; I scaled up my coaching. I never once scaled up my retention plan, and it cost me, and like you said, I didn’t realize until it was too late, and I was bleeding people, and I was losing $5,000 a month. So, do you have any retention numbers from this period? Like can you talk to me at all about retention and length of engagement or what happened when you grew that fast?
Kieran O’Dwyer (09:38):
Yeah, 100%. Real quick, is the reason why maybe some of the European gyms have those bigger numbers—I think Coop mentioned this—is because CrossFit and the group training is still essentially booming over there?
Mike Warkentin (09:52):
Yeah. So that’s the early adopter thing. And Chris has talked about that. And that’s kind of going in a wave where, you know, that happened. Like when I grew like this, I was one of two gyms in a city of 700,000. So, you went to that one, or you went to mine. I was shooting fish in a barrel, and I survived solely because there were two of us. That doesn’t happen anymore in North America. In Europe, that’s still kind of happening, and there are some—I know of some big European gyms with lots of members that have lower average revenue per member. So, Sara, I don’t think is in that situation, but that is a common thing too, where some European gyms charge less, than—like they’re not charging say $200, $300. It’s less than that. So that sometimes explains it too. But there’s the 150 model that we talk about where you can make $100,000 with 150 clients. We’re going to get to that whole thing. But I think you’re exactly right. There is some early adopter stuff still happening in parts of Europe where you can get away with some stuff. And again, Sara’s a very special example that doesn’t show what’s possible—well, she shows what’s possible, but not what’s common.
Kieran O’Dwyer (10:46):
Yeah. And I would say here in Australia, we are past that early adopter phase. Even if the industry with all the group gyms popping up like the Yard gym and F45 are letting you believe otherwise, we’re definitely fast pass that. And I felt it, and I have here some numbers. There was like a—this is almost embarrassing considering I’m a mentor, but hey, we all have to learn from our mistakes.
Mike Warkentin (11:09):
Well, you learned and you got, you’re a mentor because you learned, right?
Kieran O’Dwyer (11:12):
Oh man. So, there was a four-month period where there was one month, and we were on the up, right? So even though we’d be losing a fair bit, because we were getting more in, I just thought we were bulletproof, but there was one month where we gained 11 and lost 30, so that’s a net of what, -19?[3] The next month was dead even. And I actually remember being like, “Oh, we’re OK. It’s dead even. That’s fine.”
Mike Warkentin (11:37):
Hold on, dead even still costs you all that intake and marketing though, right? All that time.
Kieran O’Dwyer (11:41):
One hundred percent, but I thought that it was OK. I just thought that when it got hotter, we could get more in. But then the next three months—and these were during good months in Australia, like the beginning of the year—gain 15, lost 22, net of -7; gain 14, lost 29, which is a net of -15.[4] That’s when I knew that our goal of 300 to 400 members was not going to—I actually forgot to mention that we moved into this gym, which is bigger than our last gym because we wanted to get up to the big numbers. We did the whole moving thing, and we almost tripled our rent for that decision.
Mike Warkentin (12:29):
Oh, so you’ve got pressure; you’ve got financial pressure. Now you’re thinking, “I need more members to pay the bills.” And I got into the same thing where I rented a space that was larger than I needed with the anticipation of filling it. “If you build it, they will come.” Right? It’s nonsense. Doesn’t work. I never filled it except for my 5 p.m. class or maybe my noon class; the rest of the time it was mostly vacant. I was losing money, and I’m like, “I need more members to get more revenue to pay for this space that’s too big, and I have too much equipment and all this other stuff.” I did the same as you. I bought SkiErgs. My mistake was SkiErgs, yours was Air Bikes. I bought too many of those. They’re kind of cool. I still like them, but like they’re a great product, but I didn’t need them at the time. I needed better systems, right?
Kieran O’Dwyer (13:05):
Yes.
Mike Warkentin (13:06):
So, those are real retention numbers where you’re bleeding clients out, and you’re working super hard to acquire more.[5] You’re wasting tons of sales and marketing time getting these people in. They’re not staying very long, and you’re losing more than you’re getting. So, you’re pouring people into a leaky bucket at the same time as you’ve got this massively increased lease and all the stress; your systems are falling apart, nothing’s going right. So, let’s talk about the transition. You have fewer clients now, so how did you determine your ideal number, and did you have to take a financial hit when you scaled back? Because I think you’ve got some interesting insight here.
Kieran O’Dwyer (13:37):
Yeah. So, to break the glass, actually no, in terms of financial, and actually net owner benefit improved as we scaled back.
Mike Warkentin (13:44):
We’re going to have to dig into that.
Kieran O’Dwyer (13:46):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The way we transitioned was through Two-Brain—so, I came to Two-Brain when we were at the height of our member numbers, and my goal was still just to keep going. And I just thought that Peter would just somehow fit more people in. Peter, my mentor, we kind of turned it around. We worked on things like our onboarding. We made it longer. Yeah. We introduced more specialty projects. We pretty much really focused on our current members, but not just by giving them love, like more community, more events, more equipment. It was more like introducing things like goal reviews and rewarding them for their milestones. It was things like having a longer onboarding process, which took some convincing, I would say. And now I spend all my time convincing people about the longer onboarding.
Kieran O’Dwyer (14:41):
And then it was having things like hybrid memberships, PT, and then options—and this blew my mind—options for current members to spend more money with us. Like, whoa, why would we want that? Because I had that same CrossFit mentality, even though we’re not a CrossFit gym, we brought up in it that we’re essentially a public service. Like we’re supposed to be giving the cheapest possible membership, right? And work your ass off to make the world a fitter place. And yeah. So, when we transitioned, we used a thing called annual planning, which is essentially you decide what you need to get to your net owner benefit, right? What you need in terms of your specialty projects, the onboarding you need, the adult members, the youth members, and then you kind of work backwards. And when Peter did that with me, an early version of that, that really helped me say that I could achieve what I wanted without just getting more.
Mike Warkentin (15:38):
Aha. So it sounds like you built business systems; you’ve put in place all the stuff that you should have put in place and I should have put in place when I started my gym, and you backfilled a bunch of stuff and then—should have done this first as well—figured out, “What do I need to earn to have a life that I want that makes me fulfilled and makes me want to keep getting up and coaching people and running a gym?” You got that number. And then you start chipping back and saying, “How much do I need to charge how many clients to earn that?” And if you do that, all of a sudden, it’s not necessarily 500; it starts to look more like 150 clients at $205 with a retention of maybe 13 months, and then I can earn $100,000, and then if I want to go further, I can start playing with those numbers and doing that. But it doesn’t have to be 300, right? Is that the process for you?
Kieran O’Dwyer (16:24):
Yeah, 100%. And it is also because once you start to diversify into other things, especially personal training and especially specialty projects, it’s more expensive obviously. Like you start to understand that your group model is your budget option. It’s for people who can’t be with you one-on-one and that actually some people want to be with you one-on-one, and they need you to. So, when Coop said that in his podcast, and Peter obviously hammered into me after calls, the personal training side of our gym increased, and that actually meant that because there was a profit margin on that, a very clear one that we talk about in Two-Brain, I was able to then use that in my net owner benefit. And because the PTs were more expensive for the client—not in a bad way, but obviously just in a more value way—our staff pay went up too. So, it was just like—it was like a win. And then they started to get more ownership, and once they got more ownership of the clients, because of the more one-on-one interaction and their own specialty project, they started wanting to lead certain parts of the gym, which led me to having a management layer. So, it was like this nice little evolution.
Mike Warkentin (17:34):
So, fewer high value clients after years, after saying, “I’ve got to get more, more, more, more, more,” and being very good at it—because you’re an expert at marketing and now you teach Two-Brain clients how to do that—you could get more clients, but you’re bleeding them out. You start getting fewer high-value clients and retaining them longer. Your net owner benefit, what you earn, goes up. Your staff members start earning more. You have more space and time to put systems in place without the fires, actually build some things, check on stuff, be a CEO rather than a firefighter running around putting out blazes, and all of a sudden, you’ve got a real business that’s running properly. Now it’s counterintuitive, right? Like would you have thought this was possible in the early days when you’re like, “I need 350 members?”
Kieran O’Dwyer (18:13):
No, no. I was always very skeptical. I was just chasing the one thing, which was just more members. The industry really shoves it down your throat.
Mike Warkentin (18:21):
More group members, right?
Kieran O’Dwyer (18:22):
More group. Sorry, the answer was—yeah, I thought the answer was more group members because smaller time, just fit more people in, and it makes sense.
Mike Warkentin (18:31):
Yeah. Classes of 20 sound great.
Kieran O’Dwyer (18:33):
Yeah. But it really lowers the value for the individual in those classes. So, no wonder you can have 200, 250 paying like 50 bucks a week. We were charging 51 per week—I don’t know what that is in monthly. That’s like four times, 4.3. Anyways, and then we had students on as low as $42 a week. We removed the students—and this is where the increased staff pay and that benefit also comes in—we remove the students slowly, and then we slowly increased our membership pay. And for new members at the moment, for our group, it’s $69 per week. A slow purposeful transition, and it’s because our coaches got so much better at the same time because they could focus on a few less people in a class, like 12 people as opposed to 27. And if you’ve got 27 people in a class, you’re a body pump instructor. You’re just, “Woo!”
Mike Warkentin (19:33):
That’s exactly what you are. It sounds to me like—I didn’t do the exact math in my head here, but it sounds like your ARM almost doubled. Am I right on that?
Kieran O’Dwyer (19:41):
Well, yeah, yeah. Especially because we—actually, if we were to look at the numbers, it probably did almost double if we were to include the PT on top of that as well. And then the onboarding, and then we actually did nutrition for a while when I had a coach who was nutrition. So, yes. Yeah.
Mike Warkentin (19:56):
So, and you run your own numbers, listeners, in your head, but if you doubled your average revenue per member, how many clients do you need to hit your number? It’s way, way less. And that doesn’t mean you can’t serve a lot of people, but no one is served if you get so frazzled that your gym implodes and you want out. And that literally happened to me; Kieran was close; many others were out there where it’s just—it’s not fun anymore, and you just feel like you want to go, and no one wins when that happens. Serving a small number of people and earning a good living is not a greedy thing to do. It’s actually a pretty great thing to do because you give better service and help a smaller number of clients get faster results.
Mike Warkentin (20:32):
I will qualify this by saying that if you are a gym owner and your business model does involve a large number of clients, a Two-Brain mentor can help you figure out exactly how to do that.[6] And it’s going to be based on numbers. It’s not going to be, “I want 500 because.” It’s going to be exactly the process that Kieran talked about, right? You’re going to work through it and figure out, “Why do I want 500 members? What systems do I need to do to make that happen?” And our leaderboard recently came out, and the top Two-Brain gym had 941 members. We can serve big gyms. And we’re not saying you can’t, but you should start small and target a small number first, get your systems in place and then grow on purpose, steadily, without losing all your clients. Because Kieran and I did it the opposite. It is not the right way to go. I’ll ask you this: When you—and I know the answer; I’m going to ask you to tell the story because it’ll be fun for people to hear—what happened to your retention and your stress levels as a person when you dialed back your client count?[7]
Kieran O’Dwyer (21:24):
Yeah. So, retention improved significantly,[8] 100%. Yeah, like of course it does. And then also the quality of the people in the gym improved. Not because we had people on lower rates or anything like that, or just these people that weren’t onboarded properly were bad people. It’s just they weren’t kind of brought in the right way, so they weren’t up to speed with our processes; they weren’t up to speed with our values. They didn’t really know the coaches, so they kind of—and it was just like a shit show to be honest.
Mike Warkentin (21:54):
Well, you didn’t know their goals either. You weren’t doing goal review sessions; you had no clue what they wanted. You couldn’t help them as much.
Kieran O’Dwyer (22:00):
Yeah, like of course we thought we were doing a consult, but it was just like a, “Hey, what are your goals? Oh yeah, you’re free to jump in the next class.”
Mike Warkentin (22:06):
Yeah, group classes. Go Fran, go.
Kieran O’Dwyer (22:08):
Yeah, 100%. So, our retention improved a lot, especially as people started to bond closer with more people around them than they used to as well. Familiarity. My stress definitely went down when I didn’t have to be here as much. [9] A lot. And I also didn’t have as many people to manage, and especially because since we didn’t have that management layer, I thought that everybody’s—and we weren’t as good a coaches, and we didn’t have the systems, especially the onboarding, which I’ve got to say really help—because we didn’t have that, I could feel that people’s experience were to do with how much energy was in the class and then their relationship with me, not the coaches, because the coaches were just almost like herding cattle. They were still coaching, but they were really just helping. So, they weren’t making the bonds. And then we moved down; they developed more one-on-one bonds with people. It was just awesome. It was just much better.
Mike Warkentin (23:08):
So retention is much better. Length of engagement is increasing. And keep in mind listeners, this is length of engagement at a higher average revenue per member per month, meaning every month that these people stay, they’re paying—I think close to 300 bucks or something like that. If your ARM—if had the math right, it’s in that range. That’s huge. Length of engagement, you stretch out a great ARM over a great LEG, and all of a sudden, your lifetime value starts looking very good, and you’ve got great profit margins. Two-Brain targets 33%. All of a sudden, you’re making a great living, and you’re not stressed, and your hair hasn’t falling out. So, did your stress levels bleed off quite a bit at this point?
Kieran O’Dwyer (23:43):
Well, yeah, yeah. That’s why I’m able to be a mentor now because I was able to open up my time, and especially when the staff took more ownership because they had more connection with not just the community, but with the individuals. That’s when shit—sorry, my language. That’s when it all turned around, and it was, yeah, it was great.
Mike Warkentin (24:03):
Alright, listeners, I’m going to give you a couple things to do, and then I’m going to ask Kieran for some advice. First thing, Two-Brain has a guide: “How to Make $100,000 a Year With 150 Clients.” I’m going to put a link in the show notes. You can go into the Gym Owners United Group, and you can ask for that guide. And Chris Cooper will lay out a ton of models, five of them to be exact, that will show you exactly how to make a really good living with a certain number of clients. There are spreadsheets in there. You can then work your own numbers and figure out, “What do I need to earn? How many clients do I need to do it?” all that other kind of stuff. Start doing that process. It’s critical that you do that. And if you don’t know how to do it, my second thing is book a call; talk to a Two-Brain mentor.
Mike Warkentin (24:45):
They’ll tell you how they can help put you on this path. You might even end up working with Kieran. That’s the plan. You can start with a simple resource, figure out what you need to do, go further faster by clicking that “book a call” link and figuring out how your business can scale up. Now I want to ask you this, Kieran, your advice. So, you’ve got a gym owner out there who’s listening right now, has 100 to 150 clients and thinks, has dreams of “get going bigger.” What do you tell that client? How do they do it properly?
Kieran O’Dwyer (25:15):
Firstly, they need to decide clearly on what they want as a person, number one. So, it’s like when they talk to their clients who sit with them for a consult or an NSI or just a goal setting session, that the person will say, “I want to lose 10 kilos in one month and be skinny,” and then you find out that they really just want to feel better. They want to have more energy for their kids. So, in this case, it’s the same idea. What do you want? Do you want more members because you want to just have more, or do you want more profit and to impact more people personally? And once you realize that, then you can kind of put things in place, especially with us in Two-Brain with annual planning and Stage 1, Stage 2, you figure out how you actually get to the profit and impact more people without just shoving more on your plate as you develop more systems. That’s essentially what we do. We get very clear on the numbers first, get clear on what you actually want, and then you open up options for yourself.
Mike Warkentin (26:14):
When you work with clients and you’ve seen them follow this plan to get to 150 members at their gym, ARM of about 205, what does that gym look like? Does it look like the hair on fire stuff that you and I were doing? Or what does that gym look like when it’s set up properly from the start?
Kieran O’Dwyer (26:31):
Oh, if I was sitting in my chair, it’s literally, it’d be like the gym owner sits back, and they’re just more relaxed. I literally have seen something like this within the last couple of weeks where they’re getting more people in their onboarding, right? So, in the higher value, which is a higher amount to start with. And then they’re upselling people into their weekend class or whatever, and then you just see them kind of sit back, and they just feel more relaxed. That’s kind of what happens. And it’s just good. It’s like a feeling, and it’s really good to see. And then they’re not as focused on, “Hey, I want to get to 170 or 200,” because again, once you get above 150, like Chris has talked about, the amount of then staff and things you need in place to even manage that is hectic. Yeah. At 150, they just sit more relaxed and seem better, essentially.
Mike Warkentin (27:24):
It’s a position of power. When you get to that 150 with a good ARM and a good length of engagement, you can sit there and then say, “What do I want to do next?” And that’s a great position to be in because you could make a great living. You could open a second location, you could open some other business, you could take more time off, you could hire people—there’s all sorts of options. You could scale up with a plan. You have tons of options because things aren’t going crazy. And I’ve seen this. What generally happens from my perspective is I see gym owners in Growth get to this level, all of a sudden, they’ve got a little bit extra time and they’ve got a little bit extra money, and they start figuring out what they want to do next. And inevitably, they join our Tinker group for elite level gym owners, and they start doing some really cool stuff like opening a whiskey distillery or starting a sports beverage company or getting into crypto or getting into Airbnbs or any other kind of things. Some of them just run even better gyms and replicate them. There’s all sorts of options, but you don’t have those options when the place is on fire. So, I love it, Kieran. You said right now—what are you looking at for your ideal member count right now? What are you thinking right now is perfect for your gym?
Kieran O’Dwyer (28:27):
For our gym, we’ve mapped out how we can maintain because we’re losing just—we have coaches who are moving across the country, and for those who are in North America, Australia is absolutely massive.
Mike Warkentin (28:38):
It’s large.
Kieran O’Dwyer (28:39):
With very little people in comparison to how big it is, so we have two coaches who are leaving, and they’re like almost full time. So, obviously we’re just planning for what it would look like at legit 150. We’re still above that right now, but we’re planning, in case we need to, what 150 would look like, and it looks good.
Mike Warkentin (29:00):
And are you going to be in the poor house because of that?
Kieran O’Dwyer (29:03):
The poor—no, no. No, I would not be in the poorhouse.
Mike Warkentin (29:06):
So, that’s the thing guys. Listeners, if you take one thing away from the show, it’s this: Target a small number of high value clients and work on holding them for a long time.[10] The numbers, I’ll give you: 150 clients, $205 average revenue, 13-month length of engagement. If you get to those numbers, you can pay yourself $100,000 a year. We have spreadsheets and models that prove it. Then you can do whatever you want. A mentor can help you grow, do other stuff, or just live the high life. Whatever you want, but target that first and then figure it out with a plan. Kieran, what do you think of that? Sound like a solid plan?
Kieran O’Dwyer (29:39):
Yeah, it sounds like the exact thing that I work on daily with people that works. It’s awesome.
Mike Warkentin (29:44):
Thank you so much for sharing your story. I appreciate it.
Kieran O’Dwyer (29:47):
Thanks Mike. Thanks.
Mike Warkentin (29:48):
This has been “Run a Profitable Gym.” My name is Mike Warkentin. Please subscribe so you don’t miss a show. And now I’m going to encourage you to go to Gym Owners United and get that guide. We’re looking—the link will be in the show notes. Get that guide, and if you want to go further faster, book a call. And now here is a final message from Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper.
Chris Cooper (30:05):
Hey, it’s Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper with a quick note. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you, have already joined. In the group, we share sound advice about the business of fitness every day. I answer questions, I run free webinars, and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I’d love to have you in that group. It’s Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gymownersunited.com to join. Do it today.
