Chris Cooper (00:00):
$430 per client—it’s not only possible, that’s what our 10th-place gym made per client last month. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” Every month, we produce leaderboards to show you what the top gyms in the world are doing on six different metrics that we track. And then we interview the best and we find out what they’re doing that’s slightly differently than everybody else. And after we know what they’re doing, we test it on other gyms, and then we build our courses for our tutoring business and mentorship practice. If you wanna talk about these numbers, meet some of these owners or just want more support, just go to gymownersunited.com. You can join a free group with 8,000 of the world’s best gym owners. So this month I’m gonna talk you through our leaderboard for ARM—that’s average revenue per member.
Chris Cooper (00:54):
It’s one of the six key metrics that we track and I write about in my books and on our blog. Here we go. We’re gonna start with Number 10. We’re gonna work our way up and then I’m gonna tell you the top tips from each of these 10 gyms. Okay, here we go. Now, not every gym in our leaderboard for ARM comes from the U.S. But we translated all of their ARM scores, their revenue per client, into U.S. Dollars just to make sure that we’re comparing apples to apples. Okay, so Number 10 is a performance training gym in Canada and their average revenue per member is $430 per month. Really outstanding. And again, like this is almost triple what a lot of gyms worldwide are charging for their program. And the way that these guys did it was they really niched down on sports performance.
Chris Cooper (01:44):
Okay? If you wanna learn how to really do this, you know, you go to gymownersunited.com, and you can talk about it, but the best way to do it is really to work with a mentor at Two-Brain. So Number 10, $430 U.S. Per client per month. Number 9, a health and performance center, $445 per month. Really awesome. Number 8 is a personal training center, $469 per client per month. And we’re going up here. Number 7 is $484 per client per month. Number 6 is $493 per month. Okay? So we’ve gone through like 10 through six. I’m gonna get into the top five now, but I want you to see like not only is this possible, but it’s possible for you. Your gym can pivot to a high ARM. I share these with you not so that you feel bad that you’re only charging a hundred bucks or $150 a month.
Chris Cooper (02:37):
I wanna show you what’s actually possible there and broaden the scope of our understanding. Okay? So here we go. Here’s the top five. Now here is where we get into like over $500 per client per month. This one, first one, Number 5 is a strength and conditioning gym. Their ARM is $527 per member per month. Next above that is health and fitness center. Okay? It’s a gym and theirs is a dollar higher. It’s $528 per member per month. High five. These are friends of mine. Number 3 overall, $627 per member per month. Number 2 tops even that at $652 per member per month. Amazing. And the Number 1 ARM in Two-Brain in July 2023 was $679 per member per month. Look, imagine if every member of your gym was paying you half of that, okay? $340 bucks per month. What a difference that would make.
Chris Cooper (03:39):
The biggest challenge that most gyms face is not that they can’t get enough clients. They absolutely can get enough clients. We know how to do this. We’ve done this thousands of times. Literally the biggest challenge they face is that they’re not making enough per client. And so they have this myth in their head that “well, I’ll just make it up in volume. Like I’ll get 300 clients at 99 bucks a month.” The problem is that as your member count goes up, so do your costs. You need more space, you need more equipment, you need more staff, right? You need more software, you need more apps to track everybody. You need more toilet paper. The real path to success lies in having higher value clients. Now obviously there’s a balance, and that balance point is usually around 150 clients. 150 clients paying you a higher ARM, at least $205, will grow your business and give you a better life than 300 clients paying half that much.
Chris Cooper (04:34):
So after we identify these gyms, we go interview them. I’m gonna give you their direct quotes in their own words of how they have such a high ARM. So the first gym said, “We stick to our pricing when we have a slow month. We don’t start throwing out discounts to get more heads in. We know that there’s going to be an ebb and flow.” So the second gym on our leaderboard said, “We’re a small group and personal training studio. We have about 20 or 25 clients on group memberships paying about $225 per month. And the PT clients are paying $960 to $1,440 per month. When they come in, they have in mind like what result they wanna get, and then I ask them what help they need.” So sidebar here, this is Coop. They’re following a Prescriptive Model. The client comes in, says, “Here’s where I wanna get.” The trainer says, “Wonderful, we can get you there. Do you want to exercise in a small group setting or do you want to get there faster and work one-on-one with me?” That’s it. It’s up to the client to decide how they want to be trained. And then the method is up to the trainer. The third gym on our leaderboard said, “We’ve really only begun to scratch the surface on where we can go. These small incremental gains that we’ve made have increased our ARM by about $120 over the last six months.” Sidebar: Imagine making another $120 per month per client in your gym. Amazing. Okay, back to their quote. They said, “We increased our price point, we added new services including nutrition services. We started those in October of last year. When anyone comes in with a body composition goal, we package them together into a six-month commitment, fitness and nutrition together.”
Chris Cooper (06:14):
Then this next insight I think is gonna be really important for a lot of you. This gym said, “I was able to give our staff a raise because of price corrections.” That is so important. The Number 1 reason that gym owners can’t pay their staff more is not because they don’t have enough clients; it’s because their clients are not paying enough. When you just add more clients to get more revenue, you have to add more staff. And so the, the pie does get bigger, but it also gets sliced into more pieces. You don’t increase the pay that you’re paying your staff until you increase the value that you’re providing to your clients. And I mean measurably. So like the clients are paying more now. The next gym said, “We value our time such that we charge appropriately for our service. And thanks to Two-Brain mentorship, we have good systems to set proper expectations throughout our client’s journey.”
Chris Cooper (07:03):
Hey, I love that. Thank you. The next gym on our leaderboard for highest ARM said, “Since we’ve made some changes to processing and gone to a subscription-based model, this is the ARM that we’ve come to have, And we’re almost exclusively personal training. So our rates for personal training are three times per week for a thousand dollars monthly or twice per week for $700 monthly. We also added on a lower tier with individualized programming in a semi-private program. And the plan is to fill these sessions to four clients per hour.” That’s amazing. And you know, Coop talking again now, we’ve recently gone all in on semi-private training in my gym, and it is really popular with both personal training clients and group class clients who want something kind of in the middle. I mean, I love it. I’m a client of semi-private at my gym, too.
Chris Cooper (07:53):
The next gym said, “We sell personal training in semi-private only. I’ve become pretty strict about nutrition. If you have a fat-loss goal, I’m direct that I’m not promising any sort of results if you are not willing to add nutrition into the mix.” The next gym said, “ARM has almost doubled since starting in September. Kilo has helped with this, getting the right person in the door in front of you. The website and the No Sweat Intro process helps us to stand out. Working through the conversation with the NSIs I has also helped. I share with the prospect the features and then the value of those features. And one hurdle that I faced was that I was projecting my budget onto the clients.” And with reps, they’re not doing that anymore. The next gym in our top 10 said, “We’re 80% personal training. And we get our personal training clients in twice a week. We give them a prescription at our NSI. We say, ‘We have many options. Based on what you’ve shared with me, here’s what I recommend for you.’ If they object, then we look at the next best option for the price that they can afford.” So again, like the Prescriptive Model is what’s really guiding this gym to having a higher value per client. If they just brought these clients in and said, “Come in, do a free trial,” they would never even have the opportunity to have those conversations. The client would never tell ’em exactly what they want. They couldn’t guide the client to the best service for them, and their ARM would also suck. The next gym kept it simple. They said, “We increased our prices about 9%.” Amazing, right? So important because when you increase your revenue, you increase like client value without increasing expenses.
Chris Cooper (09:26):
So all that falls straight to the bottom line. And if you wanna pay yourself more, that’s great. If you wanna pay your staff more fine. The next gym said, “Kilo is a must have. It increased the efficiency of our lead-nurture and sales processes. We replaced MailChimp for marketing emails, using the long-term client nurture to help schedule goal reviews with our current clients. And we use the notes for confirming their appointments. That definitely aids in saving time and making us more efficient at getting the right people in front of us.” The next client said goal reviews are critical because they started out as a mostly a group training facility and the most people weren’t brought in through a No Sweat Intro process. So the way they introduced their current clients to a Prescriptive Model is goal reviews. Okay? The next gym said, “Something unique to us is we have a large number of pricing options. Everything from monthly membership for access only to quarterly training packages for three months at like twice a week. There’s no nutrition options.” And so, you know, sidebar, what that means is that you can drive up your ARM by adding things onto the client based on what they need. Or also like the client’s progression. So if they’re at a spot where they don’t need as much coaching, you can cautiously add on like access, right? So you have to take that in mind, too. Like the way that I added access, just as a cautionary tale, was wrong in the beginning. The way that some gyms are doing it now—putting it as an add-on to their personal training or group class or whatever for very experienced clients only who are following your plan, not following the secret squirrel programming that they bought online—that’s where it can work.
Chris Cooper (11:07):
Okay? This next insight is really interesting. They said, “I’m fortunate that I sublease” so other people are paying them rent. “And I’m a one-man show. I’ve increased our rates several times since September. Joining Two-Brain is the best thing I’ve done professionally.” Thank you so much for great shout-out. And the last gym on our top 10 for ARM in July said, “We really key in on the avatar.” That means they’re niching down, which means they can provide more value because their value scope is narrower, right? They’re specialists and they can charge more for that value because it’s so specialized. Alright, so those are our top 10 for ARM and their best advice to you, the gym owner out there who’s listening to this show, “Run a Profitable Gym.” I want you to have a better gym. I want you to make a better living. I want you to have a bigger income so that you can create more impact for your staff, for your family and for your community. If you want to get free help, you can go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free public group. There’s 8,000 gym owners in there. We’re constantly giving free stuff away to help you grow your gym and to thank you for your service.
