Mateo: 00:00 – Hey, it’s Mateo Lopez of Two-Brain Marketing. On this edition of the Two-Brain Marketing podcast, I’m talking to Jonathan and Tyler of CrossFit Resurrection. You’ll hear about their experience going from coaches to buying out the previous owners of the gym. You’re gonna learn more about their growth in the Two-Brain Incubator and how last month they spent $800 on ads and generated over $5,000 in front-end sales. You’ll also hear their take on what it takes to have and maintain a successful partnership in the gym business. So you don’t want to miss this. Make sure to subscribe to Two-Brain Radio for more marketing tips and secrets each week.
Chris: 00:40 – This episode is brought to you by Healthy Steps Nutrition. I first met Nicole over a year ago when one of my favorite CrossFit affiliates introduced me to her, because Nicole was helping them, Sam Brumenschenkel at CrossFit Port Orange, start a nutrition program in her box. And that conversation turned into something larger. A year later, Nicole has a fantastic bolt-on nutrition program that you can add to your box anywhere in the world. So if you’re thinking, “I need to start presenting better nutrition information to my clients” or “I need a new revenue stream,” or “I want to know more about nutrition, but I don’t know where to get started,” Healthy Steps has that. What they’re going to do is put you or one of your coaches, even better, through a course, get them qualified to start teaching nutrition. Then they’re going to add you to a private Facebook group. They’re going to give you a rollout so that you can do a nutrition challenge at your gym, which more than pays for the cost of enrolling them in the course, and then provide an ongoing mentorship program for your nutrition program so that you can continue to run things for your clients like a nutrition accountability plan every month like we do at Catalyst. Nicole is a fantastic person, and after launching Healthy Steps Nutrition online, she actually opened up her own box. She’s working with some massive clients, including some big, big school boards across the country now and she’s in a great position to actually change people’s lives with nutrition. You can be a conduit for that. Your clients need nutrition advice and counseling. Healthy Steps is the best possible solution to this. It’s bolt-on. You can take a coach who’s passionate about nutrition and give them the help they need to start a program overseen by a registered dietician, Nicole Marchand. Healthy Steps Nutrition is a proud sponsor of Two-Brain and I am so glad to have them. Nicole will be speaking at our Summit in Chicago, June 3rd and fourth this year. You do not want to miss her.
Mateo: 02:35 – Hello, welcome to the Two-Brain Marketing podcast, I’m your host, Mateo Lopez. I’m one of the digital marketing mentors at Two-Brain Business. Thanks for tuning in. This is your weekly dose of digital marketing magic. Every week we’ll go over marketing campaigns, strategies, useful tips and updates to keep you in the loop on what’s going on, on advertising, on the Internet, and in today’s episode I’m coming to you from Los Angeles. I’m not in my normal office for those of you who are watching this instead of just listening to it. So that’s why I might look a little, might be in the dark slightly, but we have very special guests today. We have Jonathan and Tyler from CrossFit Resurrection. And in this week’s episode, you’re gonna learn about their experience and how over the last month they spent over $800 in paid ads and were able to generate over $5,000 in front-end sales. So we’re gonna learn about that right now. What’s going on guys?
Jonathan: 03:35 – Not much, how are you?
Mateo: 03:37 – Doing great. Doing Great. For those tuned in, maybe don’t know you, tell us a little about who you are, where you’re from and what’s your business.
Jonathan: 03:49 – Yes. So, my name is Jonathan Gibbons. And this is Tyler Lee. We are co-ownersf Cross Resurrection and we’re located in Barrie, Ontario, Canada.
Tyler: 04:01 – I think we’ve been owners for about three years now. We took over from an ownership team that opened it up in 2011. We were both members and kind of approached with the opportunity to take it over. I think it kind of grew to the point where it was no longer a hobby for the current owners and they kind of approached—it wasn’t what they were getting into and they wanted to get out. So we took on the opportunity to purchase it and build it up. That’s where we are now.
Mateo: 04:26 – How’d you guys get into CrossFit?
Jonathan: 04:29 – I came from a hockey background and then when I was done playing hockey, I kind of still had a big competitive drive to be fit and want to be healthy and I had a few years’ lapse where kind of my health went poor I guess is what we say. And so a buddy of mine introduced me to CrossFit and I think like in the first week I was in love with it and the methodology of it and just the intensity of it, it was something that was really geared towards my interests. So it wasn’t hard for me to pick up and fall in love.
Tyler: 05:04 – Yeah. I kind of came from a similar background. I was playing a lot of sports as a kid, had a scholarship to the States for soccer and kind of just found CrossFit as a way to fill the competitive void. I started actually doing it on my own, like just at a regular gym and in my garage at home. And, just found it was just easy to follow structured workouts and compare to people across the board. And that kind of lured me into a CrossFit gym. Just made it a little bit easier to do the Open, actually. So that was, that was the main reason I got into it. And I think that was back in 2014. Just been doing it ever since.
Mateo: 05:37 – Awesome. And how long have you been with Two-Brain?
Jonathan: 05:43 – We’ve been with Two-Brain for eight months now—about eight months now.
Mateo: 05:54 – And what was life like before going the Incubator?
Jonathan: 05:58 – Business life was—I found that like Tyler and I, we’ve both come from backgrounds where we’ve kind of been taught to work really hard and that like, no matter what hard work will always kind of pay off and we’ll get where we need to go. When we took over the business, so we thought like, you know, as long as we worked hard, things are gonna work out in our favor and things were always going to get better. And I think at about like, I don’t know, halfway through year two we kind of realized that like, you’re working really hard. But we were kind of just spinning in circles and like we’d go up in revenue, we’d go down in revenue, we’d go up in revenue and it was like we wanted to figure out, we wanted to know what we were doing was going to be in the right direction. We wanted to figure out how we could always just be going up ideally. And then we kind of looked back at like at our abilities and what we were good at and what we knew and kind of we needed understand what we didn’t know. And that led us to kind of join up with Two-Brain. I attended a seminar I think three years, almost three years ago, with Chris. And I came back kind of really fired up and we made some changes immediately after that seminar from Chris. And that led to actually a really positive experience. And then I think we kind of thought we were good from there, and then we carried on with way we were going and we eventually, back in November it led to us signing up to join the Incubator program. So, I wouldn’t say like business was poor before we got involved. It just really wasn’t going anywhere.
Tyler: 07:41 – I would say like at the point that we took over, it was pretty much in a position, like it only had room for growth. It was a pretty small operation, like home-run operation. There wasn’t a lot of systems in place and by that I don’t even mean like business systems, we didn’t even have a POS system, we had no way of like tracking any like financial income or profit or or expenses. It was literally just like play by the seat of your pants and you just kind of pay the bills as they came in. So, I think we did a good job at organizing it from that end, getting a POS system, starting to have like an accountant track stuff for us. And that seemed to organize things a little bit for us. But at the time, I don’t think we knew really why we were running in circles until we did this. But now looking back, I think it’s safe to say that we just didn’t have any systems in place and we were just relying on ourselves to do everything. And when we were in the gym, we’re putting a lot of time into something. For example, we run a massive competition. It started small and it’s grown into a big competition in December. And when we put a lot of time into it, it creates a lot of revenue and we build it up and we market it just based off our own social media platforms. And we built it out to like 150 people, like what, 60, 70 teams and this competition and we would generate 10 to $15,000 in one month, but then we would just, we would wear ourselves thin and we would just relax for a bit and we would create enough revenue from that to kind of float what we needed and it just wasn’t carrying over. But now looking back, it’s like now we have a lot of systems in place where we don’t have to do a lot of these things. They kind of take care of themselves or we have employees doing it. So it’s kind of streamlined the operation of it and just made it way more sustainable.
Mateo: 09:18 – Why did you decide to go that first seminar with Chris?
Jonathan: 09:20 – So I attended the seminar just basically on chance. Tyler was at the con, I had nothing to do. And Jen and Steph, the owners of CrossFit Industry, they were boasting about Chris so much and they were saying how good he was. So I was like, yeah, sure, I’m going to go. And so it was just by pure chance that I went and it was, Chris is very inspiring and he’s very motivating. And I came back to Ty with like a level of excitement that was—Ty had a hard time understanding until he actually, you know, read some of the material from Chris and got some understanding, but it’s easy to come back from a conversation with Chris and be super motivated and eager to do things. I actually had the opportunity to have like a one-on-one conversation with Chris after the seminar and he helped me make probably one of our toughest decisions, I would say one of our toughest decisions as owners to date.
Tyler: 10:14 – One the best lessons we’ve probably learned.
Jonathan: 10:18 – Best lessons, yeah, for sure. So he helped us make that decision. It was great.
Mateo: 10:21 – You want to tell me what that was?
Jonathan: 10:24 – Yeah, so when we took over the business, we agreed to keep on the previous owners as—
Tyler: 10:32 – Let’s just start by saying when we took it over, what had they’ve been operating for, that would’ve been like their fourth year?
Jonathan: 10:38 – Yeah, fourth or fifth year.
Tyler: 10:40 – So they were operating for five years with zero inflation on pricing. So their prices were set back in 2011 and they hadn’t made a 5-cent increase since that in five years. So we were kind of stuck at that price point, which I think at the time was approximately $50 to $80 a month less than our competitors. So we were getting a lot of the clients that just didn’t want to spend the money at these other facilities and we were starting to increase our volume that way. But then Gibby will tell you what our next step was with Chris and why it was a difficult one.
Jonathan: 11:18 – Oh yeah. OK. So yeah. Well, Chris, initially when I met with them, there was two things that Chris kind of encouraged me to do and go home and take action on, was increasing our prices was the number one and how to do that. And then the other one would have been, we had to fire essentially the previous owners because we agreed to keep them on as coaches. And they had a very negative response to us increasing prices because they set those prices originally, they were kind of going behind our back and creating a very negative environment in our facility.
Tyler: 11:55 – I think they just had way too many personal relationships and it was just getting in the way of business operations even before we took over. I think that was the biggest issue they had.
Jonathan: 12:06 – So we sat down with them and it was a really hard thing to do because we’d known them for so long. So we had to let them go. That was a tough decision, but if I didn’t have that conversation with Chris, I definitely wouldn’t have been able to come back with the understanding and the confidence to make that decision.
Mateo: 12:24 – When people go through the Incubator, a lot of times they’re faced with some of these tougher decisions. What advice do you have to anyone who is thinking about, hey, maybe I need to raise my prices or I need to make some kind of pretty significant change to the business. What’s your advice to someone in how to address the members and deal with that?
Tyler: 12:46 – And I think I learned this from Chris after Gibby had talked to him, it was like definitely calculate it out. Like there’s a lot of math behind doing your metrics and figuring out, first of all, what you’re going to increase to, how you can justify your increase and then you can do the math and the metrics on it and kind of see if how many members you lose make it worth it. Or how many members do you have to lose for you to start losing money. And we kind of found like based off the services that are being provided around us and from competitors or fellow CrossFit gyms if you want to call it. And we kind of found that health median of where we could kind of justify the increase. We could also pad any like loss of clients at the same time and kind of break even. So were running at less volume over but we’re running at way higher value. And I would say if you’re at that point, you’re trying to make that decision, just punch those numbers quickly or contact Two-Brain and get them to calculate it for you and talk you through it and then just make the increase. Don’t try to justify it by grandfathering rates in or making small increases. It’s just kind of just, I think, I don’t even know if they mentioned it, but just rip the Band Aid off, you know, maybe make a big jump and pull the Band Aid off. I was terrified to be honest.
Jonathan: 13:53 – Yeah. I found my biggest advice for people would—most CrossFit gym owners, we come in and we’re that whole left brain right brain thing is like, we often make decisions based on our emotions and how we feel and off our personal relations. And I think, what Tyler’s alluding to is you know, look at the numbers, right? The numbers. It’s OK to look at those numbers and it’s OK to use those numbers. It’s great that we work with our emotions and we work with personal relations, but it’s also just as important to us to work the other side of the brain and crunch those numbers and use those numbers.
Tyler: 14:35 – I feel like you feel like the enemy or you feel like a bad person when you want to make money. And I think we went through that for a few years. We both have jobs outside of the gym and you almost feel guilty and trying to make a profit, you know what I mean? So we spent the first couple of years just like trying to put money back in the gym and not paying ourselves. Cause it was like, well, I don’t want to pay myself as people are gonna think like I’m trying to screw them over or I’m trying to take their money, but it’s like, this is a business, like we should be making money. And I feel like a lot of people are scared to do that. You know what I mean? You don’t want people to think you’re just in it to take their money, but if you’re providing them something, you should be making money off of it, is easiest way for me to put it. And it took me a while to realize that.
Mateo: 15:16 – Yeah, it’s a mind shift for sure. It’s a shift in thinking. I went through the same thing, man. You know, when I was on the employee side too, I was like, oh no, I shouldn’t ask for more money. Like I shouldn’t—I don’t want people to think I’m taking vacations or what not. And I get it, and I think it is because it’s so interpersonal, right? You’re selling yourself, you are selling. It is a relationship in a lot of ways. Right?
Tyler: 15:51 – I think it brings lots of value, then. It’s worth it.
Mateo: 15:55 – 100%. But I think it’s why it’s not instinctual for us to think if you’re coming into this from that kind of a background of helping first and just loving CrossFit. And I think that’s why it’s hard to see that. But yeah, I think, but once you can understand that, and like you said, look at the numbers, it’s critical because if you don’t, if you can’t make a profit, you can’t pay yourself. You can’t grow and you can’t help people. Yeah, totally. Well then we’re talking about numbers and you mentioned earlier your competition and some of the things like that. What is it that you guys sell and how do you sell it?
Jonathan: 16:38 – I would say that we sell solutions to people’s problems or sell solutions to their goals, right? Yeah. And number one, we sell coaching. Like we sell a fix. We don’t kind of beat around the bush. We sell a solution to someone’s problems via coaching. And that could be in a number of different ways, whether it be nutrition, whether it be movement, whether it be group class, lots of different things.
Mateo: 17:06 – And how do you sell it?
Jonathan: 17:08 – We sell face to face, like we sell it through relationships, face-to-face relationships. We get people in the door and we sit down with them and we tell them how we can help them and we make sure that that meeting occurs face to face with people so we can create that relationship.
Mateo: 17:25 – You mentioned getting people in the door. What was your strategy for attracting new members prior to Two-Brain?
Tyler: 17:33 – Just organic growth and word of mouth, I think. We were starting to build up a bit of a social media platform on Instagram just cause there wasn’t one before, but we had no way of tracking leads or drawing leads in or giving them the opportunity to book. It was pretty much just simply putting out an email address and a phone number and hoping for the best.
Jonathan: 17:51 – Word of mouth from our current members, referrals, sometimes. People that were walking in or finding us on the web.
Tyler: 18:00 – We had no digital marketing in place at all.
Mateo: 18:03 – Was it just a time issue or was it just you had no where to start or what?
Tyler: 18:09 – We didn’t know a lot about it at the time. Like neither of us had business backgrounds. I had no experience with doing digital advertising. I think one of the steps we missed here too, before we got into Two-Brain is we actually had a friend of ours who’s in marketing and advertising. He actually came to us and said, hey, like nobody’s running ads in this area. You guys need to be running ads. And we were like, what the hell are ads? Like what are we doing? I don’t even know what you’re talking about right now, like we can’t afford that. You know what I mean? We just didn’t know enough about it to give them an educated answer. And he was like, well I’ll be your guy. Like I’ll get you set up, I’ll get all this stuff in place for your marketing and advertising and stuff. And then the question that he came back with was, if I get you guys a hundred people in the door, how many of them can you sell? And then that was when like, whoa, we to need to sit down and think about this. So he left and Gibby was like, or John was like, we need this. I think we should do Two-Brain. And now going back, looking back through, it’s like we essentially would have been jumping through the Incubator, going right to marketing and we would have had no systems in place to handle the volume of people that he would have generated because the leads would have came, I’ve seen how the marketing works now. He would have got us a hundred people in the door and we probably would have been able to sell zero of them. We wouldn’t have been ready for it. We would have had no processes in place. We wouldn’t have known what to do. So that was kind of where we started with Two-Brain was like right at that moment, I think we signed up for Two-Brain the next day. Thank God.
Mateo: 19:39 – So he said, if I get you a hundred people, a hundred leads, are you going to be able to sell them?
Tyler: 19:46 – He said, “You have process in place to handle that?” And we said—we didn’t even answer him, I don’t think, I think we just said, yeah, give us a couple of days and we’ll think about it.
Jonathan: 19:54 – Yeah, we kind of were overwhelmed, what do we do with a hundred people? Like what do we do with a hundred leads? How do we start? Like, yeah, we might’ve been able to sell a few, but—
Tyler: 20:01 – I’m not here. I can’t do it. Me and John were like, well we’re not here. And we had no coaches that were making sales at that point. They didn’t even know how to input people in a computer at that point. We were doing all that.
Mateo: 20:12 – Right. So this is a problem that a lot of people have even going through the Incubator. It’s like, “Hey, I’m still coaching all the classes. Like I don’t know how I’m gonna take care of this.” So obviously you went through the mentoring process, but how did you guys fix this problem? Because that was really what seems to be the blockage, right? There is a way to get a hundred leads, but there’s a systems error, we won’t be able to sell them. So how did you guys end up fixing that problem?
Tyler: 20:39 – The Incubator.
Jonathan: 20:39 – So the Incubator helps a lot. So working with our mentor, we created a lot of systems on like—and through the marketing, too, like lead nurturing, following up with people. We learned how to do the sales, how to NSI. We implemented NSIs, we implemented a proper on-ramping process, like a structured SOP to on-ramping process, a structured SOP, NSI process. Just recently, well, within the last few months we worked with like standardizing and SOP, how we do our lead nurturing. So having those processes in place and having a systematic approach to how somebody comes through your door right from their opt-in or even if they don’t go through—even from a phone call, having that process that everyone follows the same process, has standardized everything and made it so it’s, you know, there’s no question about, there’s no confusion.
Tyler: 21:38 – No assuming common sense is what Chris says. Write out everything, every little process. Even the benign process that you think anybody would be able to do and figure out, make sure you write it out. So we started writing out literally everything, how to turn the lights on, how to fill a mop bucket, how to turn a computer on, how to trouble shoot stuff. And we, I don’t think we’ve stopped writing SOP since we started the Incubator. We always find something where we’re like let’s write an SOP for it, you know, and it definitely streamlines everything.
Mateo: 22:07 – I think that’s so critical I think. I think that last thing you just said, don’t assume anything. You know, if there’s something that needs to be done to just write it down and write down how to do it. How did you guys get your staff trained up? I guess that was kind of what I was alluding to. Yeah, the Incubator, I mean, everything you guys just said was I think spot on. But how did you—you wrote these SOPs down, how did you get everyone trained up and an board?
Jonathan: 22:31 – We are very, very fortunate that we have two coaches in our gym that basically came to us and were like, well, we want full-time careers. We want to do this full time.
Tyler: 22:43 – This is before we started Two-Brain, too, like this is right when we took over.
Jonathan: 22:46 – Yeah. They said, we want to be full time. So when we started with Two-Brain and we started this Incubator process, we were very fortunate in the fact that we could, Tyler and I could learn a process, SOP it, run it a couple times, not very long, not having run it very long, and then it was very easy to transition onto these two coaches. So Tyler and I never really got tied up doing anything for too long and we were able to kind of like, our mentors will say that we get a task and we whip through it really quickly, we get it done and then we move on and we’re ready for the next thing. So we’re very fortunate. We have two full-time coaches that work very, very hard. And they want this to be their career.
Tyler: 23:33 – At the time, when we were just starting, like going through this process we had the one, we kind of had him in like a general manager/head coach role initially. And then we had a second coach come to us with a more of a full-time attitude and they wanted to get into running a nutrition program. And at that time we were going through the Incubator and we knew we had to open up a few more legs for income streams. So it was a no-brainer to bring her on. She was good friends with our general manager. And she had a good rapport in the CrossFit industry. So we brought her on. And she kinda came on at a good time because we were starting to grow at that time and we had all these other like lags that we needed to fulfill and she fulfilled one of them for us and that allowed our general manager to just focus on the other two. And we could just kind of take it a further step back and just run operationally and grow, and implement things and run this. And we’re lucky that they’re both very driven just like we are, and they kind of understand like, I think initially we were pretty hard people to work for, just cause like, we like things done a certain way, but I feel like they have the same mindset as us. Like they like things done right. They like to follow up on things and they like having systems in place. So it was kind of an easy transition for us. I don’t even know what we would do without them. I don’t know where we would be without them to be honest. I don’t know how we would do it, because apparently this isn’t normal. So to me this is normal. I don’t know how other people do it.
Mateo: 25:09 – I mean that’s true. I think it’s both, right? Like if you’re fortunate enough to find people who are on board and proactive from the get and who are hungry—
Tyler: 25:22 – I think it took a bit to make them aware of the possibilities for sure. But I think going through the Incubator and having people who have done it firsthand and people who have experienced growth and have experienced the opportunity to make money as a personal trainer and a staff member of a gym or in the CrossFit industry, once they kind of heard that and they just got back from the Summit in Chicago and we brought both those coaches with us. I wasn’t there, but John went down with them. I think it kind of opened their eyes and say, hey, like Ty and John aren’t blowing smoke. Like this is real, and we’re starting to see it and now we’ve heard it from many other people, and I think that even motivated them even more. So.
Mateo: 26:03 – Yeah. I think that’s that education piece, right? Yeah. Just showing them what’s possible. I think you’re totally right. I think you’re totally right; that’s a big, it’s a very important piece.
Tyler: 26:14 – That’s the misconception, man. I talk to my family all the time and they’re like, how’s the gym going? I’m like, it’s going great. Like, it’s growing and they’re like, ah, you’re only going to make this. Or like, it’s really just a hobby. I’m usually just like, yeah, whatever. I don’t even want to tell them what the possibilities are cause no one’s gonna believe you, you know what I mean?
Mateo: 26:35 – Yeah. No, I do know what you mean on that one. I can relate to that for sure. So tell me a little bit about then the system that you guys have built out to attract new members and the paid advertising piece. Tell me about, you know, what you guys do there and a little bit about the SOPs that you have for your staff to make sure you guys are taking care of leads and making sales.
Tyler: 27:07 – OK. So, before we even got into marketing, we were at that point where we were developing these SOPs and we were kind of streamlining our intake process. So first of all, we had to put one in place. So we said, OK, well when people come in through the door or people contact us, what’s our process going to be? It needs to be the same every time.
Mateo: 27:24 – No matter the channel that they came in, even before you were doing ads.
Tyler: 27:29 – So that was when we implemented the No-Sweat Intro. We kind of put that name on it. We put the system in place on the computer and in our POS system, we gave them, what is it, two clicks or less, so you can book on every social-media platform. Every platform that we had, they could book with one click or two clicks or less. And it all went to our operating system. We use Zen Planner. And I kind of embedded that in every system that we had working with one of our guys that does all that for us. And we made it very simple. We sat down, we had a meeting, we showed the coaches other than our manager and our other head coach that we were just telling you about, and we said, hey guys, here’s, here’s what we have going on. Here’s the No-Sweat Intro. All you need to be able to do when people come in is click this link. Here’s all the links on Instagram, on Facebook, on our website, and here’s a giant link on all the computers in the gym. If someone walks through the door and asks you a question about the gym and you say, perfect, click the link and I’m going to sign you up for a 15-minute No-Sweat Intro, you can have a discussion with them. No more of this “here’s our prices.” Here’s this. Perfect. Let’s get you signed up for 15-minute No-Sweat Intro. And they were all on board with that and they’ve been doing that ever since, and it’s way easier for them just because of the way we kind of operate things. We don’t have a front admin girl at this point. We’re starting to explore that now with growth. But it was an easy way for them to walk away from class for two minutes and say get them booked in.
Mateo: 28:53 – It’s like if you’re coaching class, you’re working out, it’s fine. Here, go to this link. You tell that person no—if they’re caught up, they’re coaching, whatever. It’s like, great. Take two seconds, point them to this link and you can go back.
Tyler: 29:06 – Essentially everything went to the No-Sweat Intro. We even created an actual paper copy of the information we needed to book a No-Sweat Intro. So if they were really jammed up, they could say, hey, yeah, perfect, here, fill this sheet out, this intake form out, and I’ll be over to talk to you if you have 15 minutes. If not, just leave this on our desk and we’ll get you booked in. Fill this out. So that streamlined everything in that case. And we had already got a lot of opportunities without even marketing yet to at least contact people. So that was our first step in creating leads, like organic leads is at least we can contact these people. We had a huge problem with people coming in and coach saying, “Oh, this person came in.” “Oh, what’s their phone number?” “Oh, I didn’t get a phone number, I just got first name.” We can’t do much with a first name. You know what I mean? It’s kind of hard and we didn’t realize the importance of we need to have ways of contacting these people. So we kind of started with that first. We had the NSIs in place before we started marketing and we kind of started practicing with me and John doing the first couple I believe. And at that same time, we developed the NSI process, we developed our on-ramp process.
Jonathan: 30:13 – Just to add in, we also have a lot of, like when someone signs up, we created basically automated lead nurturing. This is before Facebook marketing, but we had an automatic lead nurturing with follow-up emails and text messages that we put in through our operating system so that when someone did get put into the system or booked for an NSI, there was an automatic chain of emails and text messages that went to that person so that we were constantly keeping in contact with them until the date or the time of their NSI.
Mateo: 30:48 – How long did it take for you guys to build out that lead nurture sequence? The automated one?
Jonathan: 30:54 – A week, wasn’t it?
Tyler: 30:56 – I don’t know how fast people go through the Incubator, but I mean like, there was nights where I was up till like, I would just stay up all night and just get like I would write it out like processes all night long. And then I think sometimes we would come back to our mentor and she would be like, Oh my God, I can’t believe you guys have done all this stuff.
Jonathan: 31:15 – Yeah, I think we did all the emails, like all the follow-up emails and the text messages done in one day. And then I went, I actually went to visit my family up north. And I still, like each morning before my family was up, I finished off like all of our follow-up on-ramp emails. So like we went through it pretty quick.
Tyler: 31:37 – I think we were kind of lucky cause we were doing it together so we would go through all the modules. Sometimes we would sit down and do it together, go through the modules and then we would just say, OK, you get this done, I’ll get this done. So I think at the same time it was—it’s kind of hard to explain but Gibby was getting those done. And I think was rolling out the on-ramp program at that time, like actually building that. So by the time he had all the automations and those systems in place, the on-ramp was built out and all the NSI stuff was implemented. So it kind of just came together as one and then we were ready to present it to our two head coaches.
Mateo: 32:10 – That’s beautiful. Teamwork makes the dream work. I love it. That’s great. But I mean, I guess, I only ask that because, yeah, it took some time. It took some late nights, it was once he did it, you did right. It was done.
Jonathan: 32:24 – So beauty of it, once it’s in place and running, you can kind of stick and move, right? You get one thing done and you make sure it runs and then you move on. And then if you’ve got to come back to later on, but at least it’s been running that time. Right.
Tyler: 32:36 – You kind of run through it yourself too. And then that way you can see if you made any mistakes or if there’s any flaws anywhere, anything you can fix before you pass it onto another team member. But I feel like that’s super important too. It’s probably pretty easy when you get busy to just make a system up and be like, I’m not even gonna run this. I’m just going to give it to my coaches to operate. And then they run into issues and you’re like, well I don’t even know where the issue came from.
Mateo: 32:57 – Right, right. Yeah. You gotta beta test it first or put yourself through it. Yeah.
Tyler: 33:03 – That’s what our mentor told us anyway, like she’s like, you guys have to be going, you guys have to run some NSIs yourself. You have to run some on-ramps yourself before you can pass it on. So that was what we did.
Mateo: 33:13 – All right, so now you guys have some systems, right? So you built out an automated lead nurture sequence. You standardize the process for booking No-Sweat Intros or for people who come in through any kind of pipeline. And the sales process itself is written down, the on-ramp process is written down. Now you guys are ready for some paid traffic. What happened?
Tyler: 33:36 – So that was at that point I think we finished the Incubator. And we were introduced to the marketing mentor and we kind of, he just kinda got us started going through like the Incubator for Facebook marketing. I had actually already like played around with ads with a friend of mine. Cause I was, I realized after that guy had approached me about how about ads I had started looking into it with a friend of mine who does marketing and he’s like, yeah, he kind of walked me through Facebook, showed me how to build out like advertisements, how to put all that stuff in. I didn’t know too much about the details of it, but I knew how to build one. So I had already built a couple ads that we weren’t running. I didn’t turn on, I just built them, I don’t know why this is, I didn’t even know about any Incubator yet. So when I went through the Incubator, we were going through a few of the stages and I’m like holy, like I already know how to do all this stuff. So that kind of saved me a lot of time, like actually had to build up an ad. So I think by the time we got to that point, I had already had the ads built when we met Dan.
Jonathan: 34:32 – We had some stuff. We had no copy.
Tyler: 34:36 – No, no, no, we didn’t have the actual copy yet because those were all in your folders, but I had already had some like stock photos, like photos from our gym and stuff like that. And all I had to do really was just cut and paste it into our ad sets, change the demographic, change our limitations on who we wanted this to approach. I could see how that part of it would be very difficult if you were doing it on the fly, like you would really have to sit down and go through it. So I kinda had like a semi mentor take me through a preview and then I went back through it and kind of learned the details about it. So I was able to focus more on that stuff.
Jonathan: 35:07 – I was the opposite where I had tied to that Facebook, that little prelude Facebook thing before we got into the Facebook Marketing Incubator, I had zero. So when I started talking with Dan, our marketing mentor, that was like learning from scratch for me and Dan makes it, he made it really simple and easy to understand. So I was able, you know, Tyler was already like right on the same page with Dan. Like every click was like, yeah, I know how to do that. We’re good. Yeah. And he moved through really quick. But Dan also made it very understanding for me to go through, so that, I mean, Tyler handles most of the Facebook marketing stuff right now, but I still have a very good understanding of what’s what’s going on when Tyler does stuff, like it’s just that he does a lot of the click and drags and a lot of the typing and stuff like that. But because of Dan and going through that with me, I have a 100% understanding of it.
Tyler: 36:00 – So logistically going through and being able to build it up I had a good understanding of, but I still didn’t understand like the metrics of it. So I think going through the Incubator for Facebook marketing really taught me like what the numbers mean. So like your clicks per link, or sorry, your link clicks or your cost per lead. Those different numbers, like that huge, that huge like page of numbers that you’re like, what are all these numbers? Just like what it’s telling you, how they’re performing, and important stuff for like when to shut down like ad sets or like shut down one ad in a sad or swap the picture out or swap the swap the description or details out. And Dan kind of helped us with that stuff and it’s actually super important for keeping things like learning and keeping things operating at a certain level.
Mateo: 36:52 – So then for your first campaign, you know, how much traffic did you end up generating, how many leads?
Tyler: 36:58 – So we’re still running our first campaign, we started with the eight-week female challenge. Yep. And the one I told you about there, I think we’ve been running it since May 23rd, 24th. So we’re just over a month, a month and four days. And that was our first campaign that we rolled out. So we ran one ad set with three ads, like three copies I think for the first three weeks, two are performing really well. And one was performing a little poorer than the others so we swapped it out and then now they’re all running at the same level. I think we’re still pretty low on that. But anyway, they generated in the first month, I think we generated 110 and now I think in the last four days we’ve generated another like 15. So we were at 125 leads in just over a month.
Mateo: 37:47 – So you did that a hundred—we hit that point. We hit the a hundred lead. That actually happened.
Tyler: 37:51 – Yeah, that actually happened.
Mateo: 37:52 – And so what happened, you know, how did you guys handle that? Or you just handled it, you knew you could handle it.
Tyler: 37:57 – First off, having all those processes in place made it pretty easy. I think at first we were a little like, I think we started getting a little bit overwhelmed with it, but then we kind of, I went back through the Incubator and was like, well how do you handle this? Like if you get too many people. I think the first problem we had, and it was something that we didn’t see coming, was we were trying to tend to these people’s schedules instead of worrying about our schedule. So we were worried about them a little more than ourselves. And I went back through and it said, just give them times to book. Don’t say, when does it work for you, because people will come—like you have nine people that want to come in at one time. So we had that from—because our coaches were saying, well if this time doesn’t work you, I’ll make it work for you; what time? We had people coming at nine o’clock at night, people coming in at seven in the morning and our coaches really couldn’t make it work, but they were making it work, you know what I mean? So we went back to, OK, here’s your three slots, these are the times we have available. And that really kind of streamlined the volume and we were able to handle it a little better. And we tried to book people in very quick so we had to keep them in that three-day window. If it wasn’t that day or or right then it was within the next two days/
Jonathan: 39:01 – We would also do the they, if you’re available to come in right now come in right now.
Tyler: 39:05 – Yeah. And we just told the coaches really cause at that point after we had run it, we did the first, like probably 30 leads, were doing the NSIs and I did the first couple on-ramps and then after that we passed it off, so they had another 95 leads at that point and I think they were getting a little overwhelmed cause they were doing that, they were saying come in now, come in whenever works for you. I’ll book you in. I said put in your availability on your schedule and if those times don’t work for people then we’ll have to find another time that works for them. We’re gonna generate enough leads here that we can make it work. We can’t just put it on their schedule cause it’s not going to work.
Mateo: 39:41 – Yeah. Giving them I’ve got this time available, I got option A and option B. Which would you prefer?
Tyler: 39:47 – I personally think it actually makes it easier for them. I feel like a lot of time when you say, “Hey, what’s best for you?” They either can’t think of a time or are they don’t actually know like what works for them. If you give them a time, they’ll agree to something, you give them a couple options, they’ll make it work. I’m the same way. If I’m given an appointment, like I’ll show up for my appointment.
Mateo: 40:08 – Totally, totally. Awesome, and I know we talked about at the beginning, so a hundred leads, so you guys generated, what over $5,000 in front-end sales from—?
Tyler: 40:18 – I think the actual calculation is like $5,100-something and we spent about 800, we’re just over 800 I want to say 840 or 850 bucks. Not far off from that. Just on the female one and Dan wanted us, Dan is our mentor for marketing, he wanted us to start with the females and practice on working with the women first. He said it’s just a little bit different as far as the sales tactics go. So we started working on that and we did the first few, got our team working on it and they kind of got into the sales thing and they’ve learned a lot from watching you on the Incubator and going through your stuff. So they’re constantly going through it.
Mateo: 40:57 – That’s awesome. But besides this, right, besides this additional growth in revenue from the paid ads, like I know we talked about raising prices and raising the value of your service, obviously you’ve generated enough additional income to hire that other coach. What have you seen is the big change, like, the big difference after going through the Incubator between before and where you guys are now?
Jonathan: 41:20 – I think the biggest change that we’ve seen after going through the Incubator is that through implementing all our SOPs and all these processes, it’s given Tyler and I an opportunity to step back from the hands-on, day-to-day stuff. And it allows us to grow the business, you know, work on new things, work on building out revenue streams. And that’s another big thing is revenue streams. Like we had one single revenue stream before we started with Incubator.
Tyler: 41:49 – We were like, we need 300 CrossFit members or we’re gonna go bankrupt!
Jonathan: 41:50 – Now we have multiple different revenue streams. We have a business that stands on more than one leg. So that’s been, I guess one of the biggest things. But since doing the Incubator, Tyler and I sit back and we can look at either bringing in new revenue streams, implementing new revenue streams or you know, creating new SOPs or really sitting back and evaluating what works and what doesn’t work for us. So I mean, I don’t even think that before the Incubator process, I don’t even think Tyler and I, or I wouldn’t have been able to take that, you know, that four days and go to Chicago and for the Summit and learn everything that I did there. So it’s given us the ability to step back and really grow our business as opposed to just working our business.
Mateo: 42:39 – That’s amazing. And I think that’s great. And I think that’s exactly—that’s the point, right? We want you guys working on the business instead of in the business. 100%. That’s the only way that it can work, I think. And so you guys have come a long way, right? You started as coaches three years ago and took over this business without any kind of background in business. You guys say it yourself. And then you went from charging $50 less, $80 less than market value for your services to being able to turn that around to being able to grow your team, to get systems in place to a point where, hey, if you want to attract 20, 30 new members a month and generate some extra revenue, you guys can do that. Your infrastructure can handle it and you know how to do it. So what do you think has been the key to the success so far for you guys?
Jonathan: 43:42 – What’s the key to our success so far? I would say like teamwork and communication through—
Tyler: 43:49 – Consistency.
Jonathan: 43:49 – And consistency. Working consistently with each other. Good communication between Tyler and I to make sure that we’re both handling the sides of the business that we need to handle. Good, positive communication with our coaches is a key to success. Also, for me specifically, I think the key to my success is understanding what I don’t know and reaching out to people that have done this before. I find I gain a lot of knowledge through just the Two-Brain family. On the Facebook marketing page, on the resources Facebook page. So yeah, going after the resources; understanding like, well, we don’t know how to do this, so let’s talk to someone who has, rather than trying to spin in circles, and try and figure it out on our own. I think that’s been the biggest key to our success is just understanding what we don’t know, and looking at the resources that we have and utilizing them.
Tyler: 44:50 – Yeah. I think just like the willingness to not fail, man. Like I feel like we’d be willing to do anything to just like make it work. If I have to run nine Christmas-Palooza competitions a year, I’ll do it to keep the business afloat. You know what I mean? Like I wasn’t just going to coast into the ground. We would have done anything we had to regardless if we hadn’t gotten into the Two-Brain thing, I think just getting into the Two-Brain thing and doing the Incubator just made that process and learning way more valuable. And instead of spinning our tires for five years and just grinding, we kind of streamlined things in our work, and our efforts were a lot more focused on things that were going to pay off long term and give us the ability to keep growing and keep implementing new things. And I think a lot of people—and I think a lot of people get it done, it just takes them an exponentially longer period of time to get these things in place and it costs you a lot of money to learn where you’re making mistakes. So I think going through the Incubator kind of helped us just that expedite that process and save us a lot of money and time and I’m grateful for it for sure, and I know that it’s made our gym better and I know that it’s made it a way better environment and it’s given the coaching environment and from an employee standpoint way more opportunities, so way more valuable for us on all, on all fronts.
Mateo: 46:11 – That’s awesome guys. And I think that, you know, what you guys were saying, communication, and I think that that’s probably key, especially for partnerships. We’ve been on here for 40 minutes, but I can tell you obviously have a good rapport and a good understanding with one another on kind of who’s doing what. And keeping that line of communication open constantly I think is probably probably a big key there because a lot of partnerships don’t. We may need to do a whole other episode just to talk about how to sustain a good partnership. But yeah, tell me a little about the rules thing.
Jonathan: 46:52 – So this is actually pretty recent—
Tyler: 46:54 – I think it kind of happened organically too. Like we kinda didn’t step on each other’s toes a lot at the start anyway. But we were kind of, he was doing some of the same things I was doing. We were kind of just overlapping and I think we kind of just said, hey, like, well you need to focus on this. I think that was actually before we got into Incubator where we kind of realize, hey look, you gotta focus on this, you focus on that. That’ll just make it a little bit more manageable for us because I feel like we ran into the problem with a partnership, I think the biggest problem that we noticed right off the bat was people come and ask you one thing and then they go and ask the other guy the next thing, and then one guy is saying this, one guy is saying that. And I think we kind of just put a nail in the coffin right away on that. It was like, hey, like we’re, we’re an open line with each other. So if you ask John one thing and ask me you one thing I’m telling you right now, we’ve already communicated and we already know what’s going on so you’re not going to be able to like pull the wool over on our eyes, so to speak, in that situation. So from the start we kind of always had good communication in that respect, but I think that was the hardest obstacle being a partnership at the start was people would try to say one thing to one guy and then you would get information from another source and then it was kind of like, well you have two things being said at the same time and we kind of just put a stop to that right away.
Jonathan: 48:05 – And we just knew what each other were good at. And then I let Tyler be good at what he’s good at and he lets me be good at what I’m at. We do have to cross over sometimes and do things together, and sometimes I gotta help him out and sometimes he’s got to help me out, but we’ve kind of just established what our roles are and what things we take care of. And if it’s something that he purely takes care of on his own, I don’t bother him about it. I don’t get in his way, but I don’t interject. And same thing with me. If it’s something that I take care of on my own, he just lets me handle it and do that. But we are fully aware of what each other are doing.
Mateo: 48:38 – That’s great guys. And so speaking of communication, if people want to talk to you, if they want to find you, they want to just learn more, how can they find you?
Jonathan: 48:51 – Easily, they can fire us an email at crossresurrectionatgmail.com. They could DM us on our Instagram page. We’re really quick to get back on that. Emails, I think we respond in less than an hour, or even quicker most of the time. But that’s the easiest way to get ahold of us is via email or drop us a line on—
Tyler: 49:14 – We both have access to all that stuff, so we’ll see it.
Jonathan: 49:17 – Or our Facebook page. Facebook page is a good way to get ahold of us too.
Mateo: 49:22 – Awesome guys. We’ll I’m excited for what the rest of 2019 holds for you. I’m excited for the men’s campaign and yeah, I’m just excited for your continued growth.
Jonathan: 49:32 – Thanks man.
Mateo: 49:33 – Thanks for coming on.eal
Tyler: 49:35 – Thanks for having us.
Greg: 49:41 – As always, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. We greatly appreciate you and everyone that has subscribed to us. If you haven’t done that, please make sure you do drop a like to that episode. Share with a friend, and if you haven’t already, please write us a review and rate us on how what you think. If you hated it, let us know. If you loved it, even better. See you guys later.
