Gym owner Jamie Warren ran into a good problem: Iron Tribe Fitness had eight locations, each running eight to ten group classes a day in about 3,000 square feet, and every one of them was full.
Ad costs were climbing, algorithms kept shifting and new leads were getting harder to come by. Jamie needed more revenue, but he had almost no open floor space or open class slots to work with.
He solved it by adding semi-private training across all eight gyms. Today it makes up roughly half of Iron Tribe’s training revenue, and the business runs at close to double the net margin it had before.
Many owners try this and either get stuck planning it forever or launch a half-measure that fizzles out in a few months. I talked with Jamie about how he pulled it off.
Watch our conversation below or keep reading for a summary.
Commit Before You Touch the Schedule
Jamie said the real first step is a decision that this is where the business is headed. He’s watched a lot of owners get stuck “thinking about adding semi-private” for years without ever pulling the trigger.
After that comes building an actual product. You can’t call something semi-private and hand the client the same programming you’d give a group class. It takes coaches who have real personal training experience and a program that holds up when someone pays a premium for it.
Start With People You Already Trust
To trial the program, Jamie picked members he’d coached for years, offered them a custom program at a discount, and slotted them into whatever dead time existed on the schedule. Group classes stayed put.
He wasn’t trying to make money at this stage. He wanted proof: real results, on video, from people who already trusted his coaches. That became the foundation for everything that came after.
Sell the Vision, Then Build the Slots
With that proof in hand, Jamie held a live webinar for the entire membership. He told them the gym’s longtime HIIT program was being phased out and laid out the case for semi-private, backed by six beta clients who spoke about their own results. He opened 100 spots at a founding-member rate.
All 100 sold before he had a finished schedule to put those people into. He figured out the class times afterward, based on what clients told him worked for their lives. Demand drove the logistics.
He created roughly six new semi-private spots, each with five clients to a coach. He moved a popular class fifteen minutes earlier when eight out of ten members said that still worked for them.
He shifted people from Monday-Wednesday-Friday to Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday when their schedules allowed it. Small changes, one at a time, until the week had reshaped itself around the new model. The whole process took about a year.
The Pain Was Short. The Payoff Wasn’t.
Jamie didn’t pretend the transition was painless. Monthly churn at Iron Tribe usually sat around 3%. During the rollout, it climbed as high as 6%—mostly members who only wanted the old HIIT format. Jamie had weighed that cost ahead of time and decided the destination was worth it.
Total revenue barely moved, but his profit margin doubled. Average revenue per member climbed from the low $200s to $383. Members are staying an average of 56 months across his eight gyms. His top-performing location now runs with 235 members instead of 300 and has a stronger bottom line than it had at the higher headcount.
What He’d Tell Another Gym Owner
If you want to add semi-private to your gym, Jamie says to find one coach who’s genuinely excited about a higher-touch program. Then pick five current members who’d benefit from it. Give them a custom plan in an open slot you already have for a set trial period. Film their results.
Once you’ve got proof, decide whether you’re ready to go further. If you are, sell members on where things are headed before every detail of the schedule is locked in.
If you want help mapping out where semi-private or small-group training could fit into your own gym without disrupting the classes you already run, a Two-Brain mentor can walk through it with you. Book a call and let’s build your version of Jamie’s plan.
