Mike Warkentin (00:02):
Do some quick math. Multiply your client count by $500. It’s a huge number, right? Today we’re talking to a gym owner whose average revenue per member, or ARM, is well more than $500, and he’s going to share his secrets with you in just a minute. Welcome here. My name is Mike Warkentin. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” I talk to the best gym owners in the world every month and every week, and I want you to find out what they have to say. So please hit “subscribe” so you don’t miss a single episode. ARM: It’s a huge deal, and know that wherever you are, you can add value for clients, and even five bucks a client drops right to your bottom line, and it’s going to make a huge difference in your business because it doesn’t come with any additional expenses. So, George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway runs Brainstorm Fitness in San Diego, California. George-Anthony, can we add five bucks to every listener’s ARM in the next 30 minutes?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (00:50):
I believe so.
Mike Warkentin (00:51):
OK, let’s do it. You made our top 10 leaderboard in April for ARM, and it was a huge number, and I want to help people out. So, let’s get into the details here. I know that you’re in a high-income area in San Diego, but you’ve got tons and tons of competition in the gym market. So how do you find these high-value clients who contribute to your ARM number?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (01:09):
One of my biggest things for finding new clients is referral base. Ah, setting up those goal review sessions, sitting in with your clients because like-minded people spend time together, right? So, the majority of the time, if they’re a high-value earner, if they are consumed and very much willing to make a decision on their health and wellness, they have one or two or three or five friends who think and feel the same way that they do. So, stepping up and sitting down with my clients and making those goal review sessions and opening up that conversation was probably the number one thing that led us to where we are today. We were already at a bit of a higher price point, but in order to be able to provide the value and show them that we can actually change their lives, it afforded that opportunity for that conversation.
Mike Warkentin (01:59):
So I think you just made people money right away in the first six minutes of this show because goal review sessions have been proven to increase ARM and retention, length of engagement, the whole thing, and I said this on the Two-Brain Summit recently: if you’re not doing one them with clients, you’re wasting money, and you’re literally not doing everything that you could do to increase value and increase length of engagement. So, you’re doing goal review sessions and you’re getting referrals out of them. That’s a huge deal because referrals don’t cost any money. You don’t have to spend any money on ads. You’re just asking people, “Do you have anyone else in your life I could help?” Right. Tell me a little bit about your goal review sessions. When did you start doing them, and did you see your numbers, your metrics, start to improve as a result?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (02:37):
I pretty much saw—I started doing them almost immediately after hiring my coach from Two-Brain, which is Nick Habich.
Mike Warkentin (02:45):
Good guy.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (02:46):
Awesome guy, awesome guy. And I was upset for a long time, to be honest, because prior to that, I always thought that my clients should be referring me business. I’m like, “How come they aren’t? Why aren’t the coaches bringing new people in? Why aren’t my clients telling people?” And it’s because I never asked.
Mike Warkentin (03:02):
So you start asking, and what happened?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (03:04):
Started asking, right? And we have a saying, right? They say, “Closed mouths don’t get fed,” right? So, you have to speak it, you have to say it right? And a lot of time, I think we have these reservations about it because we already think that we’re great, but we don’t want to impress that upon people by saying it, right? So, the goal review session, what it does, it allows them to cheerlead for you to you, right? And then when they say it out loud, they’re like, “Wow, I actually was able to accomplish this with your help. I do know someone,” right? Because maybe they had a conversation with someone else just recently that has a similar issue that they had in the very beginning, right? So, it affords them to—it brings, being able to say it out loud kind of brings it into fruition, right? Because it makes them think about it all over again.
Mike Warkentin (03:55):
You can’t expect people to bring clients to your door. I did this for a decade. It just doesn’t work, right? You just sit there, and you think, “I’ll be a great coach, and they’ll show up.” It never happens. When you start asking people and saying, “Hey, your spouse, he’s having trouble with his golf swing. He’d like to be a little bit stronger. I can help with that.” And they’re like, “Really?” Boom, it happens. So, and in the goal review format, it doesn’t feel unnatural, right? It feels very natural to say, “You’re having amazing success. You’re crushing it. Congrats on your PR. We’ve set some new goals. Here’s the plan to get there. Hey, do you have anyone else who might benefit from something like this?” And with you, you said literally people say like, “Yeah, I just talked to someone who has the same problem. Can we get them in here?” Easy day. So, your metrics, your numbers, when you started doing this, you saw everything start to move?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (04:39):
Hugely, hugely. Two-Brain has honestly changed my life completely. And it went from, especially post-COVID, because I’ve been open for about seven years now. After COVID, we were lost all over again, especially here in San Diego. It was pretty strict. I know in Canada it was pretty strict as well, but we had to change the game of it when the time came, right? We had to pivot from doing mostly classes to doing more private, so more semi-private. And for me, that was one of the things that let me know that I still had a business that could make it.
Mike Warkentin (05:16):
So right there, listeners, referrals, goal review sessions, those two things right away. If you start doing them now, you will make more money. That’s a guarantee. Our stats show that this happens. Start doing it. And George-Anthony is the proof. Now, George, you said that your ARM is slightly higher than normal for this reporting period, which was in April, but your normal target would still put you easily on the leaderboard. So, what effect did this month’s number have, and then what’s the bread and butter in a standard month?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (05:40):
We had a contract with a school, a local school nearby, right? So, a colleague of mine brought us in to do some of the strength and conditioning for the school and we ended up moving on from that project and looking for others. But that was a big chunk of change for us, right? It was a substantial number for us. However, I will say this: Although we removed that chunk, it kind of allowed us to refocus now. And instead of looking at it as a loss, it’s actually a new opportunity to be able to now fill stuff into it, because at the school we were having to travel, so there was two or three hours of a day that we weren’t here within the business. So, it now actually affords us a bit more time to be able to get more bread and butter, which for us, now that that’s been removed, are one-on-ones and semi-privates.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (06:33):
So my studio focuses on bridging the gap between physical therapy and personal training. So, the majority of our clients come to us because they’ve had some injury or ailment in the past that’s been kind of an ongoing thing for them. So, some of them have done PT and love it or hate it, and they’re looking for something that’s a bit more sustainable, or they are trying to avoid it, right? So, some people have had an acute injury, maybe a back injury or hip or a knee, and they say, “Well, you know what? I want to work out because I know it’s important to me, but I don’t want to do the traditional thing that has led me to this to begin with.”
Mike Warkentin (07:14):
OK, so you’re bridging a gap, and you’re offering a very specialized service. That’s high value, right? Anything that solves problems and bridges gaps and fills holes in markets and gets people where they want to be or produces swift results quickly, anything that does that is a high value service, and you can charge more for it, right? Dumping people into a weight room and saying, “Here’s your— $20 gets you access to all my equipment.” That’s one thing. Providing a personalized one-on-one plan to get someone through and past an injury within your scope of practice, of course, that is a high, high, high value service, and that puts you on a leaderboard. So, tell me a little bit about your gym and your business model. Like what are you selling, how much space do you have clients, all that. Just give us the 411 on what you’re doing at your gym so we can understand.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (07:57):
So we have a very small studio. So, it’s about 1,020 square feet, right? To include this office that I’m in right now. Like I said, we’ve been open for about seven years. So initially one of the things that we really focused on was what I called at the time group classes, but there was a cap to that because of limited space. So, we used to max out the class at about 12 persons, and we had a couple of one-on-one sprinkled in. Post-COVID, we pivoted quite a bit, right? Because now we have to say, “OK, we need to be able to, one, recoup some funds and set realistic targets that didn’t rely on something that was very high volume,” right? Because you had a CrossFit-style facility previously, correct?
Mike Warkentin (08:40):
I did. Yep.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (08:40):
A lot of CrossFit gyms have a volume advantage that we don’t have just because of limited space, right? I can only fit so many barbells on so many bodies in a thousand square feet. So. what we now do is one group class a day, right? That’s a 7 a.m. class. Now we do packages of class sessions, or you could do our unlimited membership. Unlimited membership is a really smoking deal. It’s a high-value, super affordable deal. And we have our long-time clients who have been here since almost day one. Then we provide one-on-one personal training. So, I have one now. I just literally sat down with a new coach yesterday, so about to be two coaches. I would be the third for one-on-one specialized injury prevention post-rehabilitative care and getting people to be what we call “Brainstorm Strong” within our facility.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (09:34):
So that builds confidence and movement without the restrictions that come with traditional exercise, right? So, a lot of times we look at movement patterns in terms of squat, hinge, push pull, but we live in—those are one dimensional movements, right? Single plane movements a lot of the time, and we incorporate a lot of transverse stuff, right? And then we also do semi-private training. So semi-private training allows for up to four persons in our same time slot. And we try to pair those with someone who has a similar goal, or perhaps they are a couple, or perhaps they are a group of friends and we get them in at what for some people is a more affordable rate than one-on-ones, but it still has the same schedule flexibility that the one-on-ones have without having to lock them into a class time slot. And they still get some personalized training in there as well.
Mike Warkentin (10:22):
So, you pulled out something that I want to highlight. Group training is your discount option, correct?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (10:28):
Yeah, that’s correct.
Mike Warkentin (10:28):
Yep. And that’s cool. That’s because for me it was the other way. Say that again.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (10:32):
It went from the top to not the bottom, right? But it changed places. It used to be our priority, and now it’s part of the conversation when someone comes in, and like we said, many, many times at Two-Brain say, “You are the professional, right?” You’re the person that they already trust the second they come into the door, they have trust in you, right? The second they show up for that NSI, they have trust in you already or else they wouldn’t walk in the door, right? So, they are trusting us to provide them with a solution for their problem. So, if their one no, if their one reason, is price, or cost I should say, then we can say, “Well here’s a reasonable alternative,” right? It’s not just, “OK, well bye,” right? It’s almost like a good, better, best, but good is still great, right?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (11:20):
Because the fact of the matter is, I think the majority of people just need to move, right? So, another person comes in, and I said, “I think you should train three times a week.” And he said, “Well, I can’t really afford three one-on-ones.” “Awesome. Well, how about one one-on-one per week. And then I’d love to offer you unlimited classes. And our classes are very scalable, very friendly, and they meet you where you are in your fitness journey,” and they go, “Well that sounds great. How many times can I come in?” I say, “Well, you come in up to six times a week for our class.” Right, so now, in the grand scheme of things, if you did one single one-on-one, and you know what my numbers are, right? So, and that’s kind of a sweet spot for us. One one-on-one a week plus unlimited classes almost gets you down to, if you really take advantage of it, that gets you $25 a session, right? Which is a steal if you were to train five times a week, right? But of course it gives you the opportunity to do so without breaking the bank for most people.
Mike Warkentin (12:13):
What a great way to drive up your ARM. Buy a group class plus one, one-on-one session, right? Like for the average gym, an average group class membership is like 160 to 169 bucks or something like that. Average PT is 75. Put those numbers together, all of a sudden, you’re looking at 225, 230. You can make a very good living. You can make more than 100 grand a year if you have 150 clients who are paying $225, $205 a month, right? So, this is an easy way and you’re doing it as this incredible dropdown sell, we’ll call it, where you can say, “Hey, I get that you can’t do personal training with me four times a week at a high rate. However, how about one plus this?” So, you get group people in that slot.
Mike Warkentin (12:51):
You fill that up. You’re making money there. Then you’ve got your semi-private, which listeners again, is people can be doing the same program or they can be doing their own program in a group of three to four where a coach circulates, and that’s a very high value service. Again, that’s a nice dropdown sell as well. Then you’ve got your top tier, which is one-on-one, my attention, personal training for the hour up to whatever many times a month. And those memberships are thousands and thousands of dollars. You’ve got this incredible package, and you can see how that ARM number starts to come up very, very quickly. Group class. Do you mind telling me how much your group class membership rate is? And if you do mind, that’s fine too.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (13:26):
200 a month unlimited.
Mike Warkentin (13:27):
Yeah, so 200 a month—that’s already more than most gyms are charging for group class memberships, but then if you tack on that single personal training session, it goes up by a huge number. Which of your clients out there, listeners, does not need a single personal training session a month to help them get through a sticking point? All of mine did. I just never told them about it. And my average revenue per member was $123 a month, not over 500. So, this is a huge win right off the bat. So, there’s more secrets right there that you can take and put in your gym: offer premium services, and when people can’t afford them or don’t want them, drop down a little bit, but tell them about the best way to get results first. When you sell stuff, George-Anthony, do you do that? Do you give them the best prescription right off the bat saying like, “Hey, it’s one on one”?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (14:12):
Yeah, absolutely. You know, they say shoot for the stars and land on the moon, right? Right. But at the end of the day, it’s the same thing, right? And honestly, once your clients trust you, and even doing this with existing clients, right? Whether it’s offering your PT clients classes or offering your class clients PT, right? It flips it on its head in terms of revenue, right? It’s a huge uptick in revenue, right? It takes it from what could be, again, 200 to 400, 400 to 600, 600 to 800, right? Depending. And doing it with your existing clients, I think, in order to affect your ARM, is that they already trust you. They already trust you. They already love you. You’ve already got them results. And this is one suggestion that you can make to get them to the next level.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (15:01):
So when you sit down for that goal review session and you say, “Here’s where we’re at,” right? And they say, “OK, well, I was hoping to get there a little bit quicker.” Maybe summertime’s coming. “I’ve got an event coming up.” I have literally—I just had a friend yesterday, we’re going on an event this weekend. And he is like, “How do I gain muscle and lose fat by next week?” And I’m like, “Had you been training with us for the last two months, you’d have been got it done.” You know, but it’s already there, right? They’re already in the room. You just have to walk to the conversation.
Mike Warkentin (15:32):
Yeah. Do you get some bleed over from your group class membership into that semi-private PT stream? Like do people eventually say, “Hey, I want to stop the gas?” Yeah, they do?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (15:40):
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that’s one of the best places to get PT is in your classes, right? Sit down. Because a lot of times we think the goal reviews are just for the already PT clients. The people who are already only doing one on one. No, ask a question. Even if you’re not the one coach in the class for the moment, especially as owners, right. For those who are in the owner’s room at the summit this year, the conversation is slightly different, but all of your clients should know you. They should know your face. They should trust you. I actually stepped in to teach a class this morning, and one of my clients came up and she goes, “This is what I pay for.” And I’m like, “That’s awesome,” so they have that trust in me, so it affords the opportunity to say, “Well, how’s it going?”
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (16:23):
And they say, “Well, I’ve been having this one issue, I can’t get this one move, or I have this one kink that has been bugging me.” “Well, you know what? How about I get you in for a one-on-one? I have a slot tomorrow.” And I think those little pieces are also crucial because it adds a little bit, I won’t use the word pressure, but it affords them, “Oh wow. He’s going to open up his thing just for me,” right? So, it allows us to say, “Hey, you know what? I have an opening tomorrow at three. I’d love to give it to you. Come in and let’s sit down and have a conversation.” And now you just doubled your number potentially, right? And even if it’s just for one month, two months, three months down the road, but now they know anytime that they do have an issue, they could come back to you and do it again too.
Mike Warkentin (17:08):
Yeah. And it’s hard to find new clients, right? Because they don’t know you. They may not like you. They may not trust you. And to sell them a huge package, that’s hard, right? It’s hard to do. It’s doable. Like Nick Habich, your mentor, is a great salesperson; he could definitely do it, but it’s not easy. But if you have current clients, and Chris Cooper has said this so many times, selling more to them, providing more value to them, is way easier because they already know you. So, an easy win, gym owners, you’ve got clients: Do they have kids? Yep. Can you help their kids? Yep. Do they need a kids program? Probably. Ask them. And if enough of them say, “I want a kids program,” start with a six- or eight-week kids program, test it out. If you fill that thing three times in a row, put in a regular kids program.
Mike Warkentin (17:47):
That’s just one example. Spouses, same thing. There’s all things. Parents, older adults, 50 plus programs—we talked about this at the summit. All these different ways to help your current clients more and help their circle because they have this—they love you, right? And so, you’re a perfect example of that. I want to ask you about retaining high-value clients because you get them, they’re amazing, they’re paying you five, seven, $800,000 a month, whatever it is. How do you keep these people long term? What are you doing specifically to make sure these people don’t go away?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (18:14):
So, I’ll actually start off by discussing losing some of them. Because I think that’s important, right? It happens sometimes. So, I recently had a client who left because he had his reasons. And I said, “OK, well I had black and white proof that showed that we met his goals.” And that’s why these goal review sessions are important as well. So, you can sit down, and it becomes their decision, not based on something that you did or didn’t do, right? So, in order to—it then allows you an opportunity to figure out “What do I need to do to keep them?” Because anytime—I think exit interviews are important, as we talk about as well. When a client leaves, “Hey, is there anything that I can do better?” And those are the things that you focus on making changes on in order to keep your existing clients.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (18:58):
So in order to keep those existing clients, it starts off by having a conversation about what’s most important to them, right? “Hey, is weight loss most important to you? Awesome. Now we have metrics for weight loss.” “Is pain management important to you? Awesome. Now I can create an intangible goal for you that’s based on a scale of one to 10. Hey, how did you feel by the beginning with this issue that you came in with, right? 10 being the worst. Was it a five or a six or a seven?” And then in 30 days, “Hey, remember that same issue that we discussed? Where are you at now?” And hopefully they’re not still at a five or a six or a seven, right? So, it’s being able to quantitatively and qualitatively show proof in the pudding as we say, right? Show that you are able to get them the result that they need.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (19:44):
And even more important, I think, is building the core of building a relationship with that client. Give a gift card, take them out for a coffee, develop a human relationship both in and out the gym, right? Because then, not only did they trust you from a professional standpoint, they just trust you as a person, right? I used to have a colleague who said, “You need two things to be successful in this industry: likability and credibility. And you can’t have too much of either one.” So, I think for my highest value clients that I’ve been able to keep—and we’re just now getting these numbers right, I’m just now starting to see these metrics for LEG, for length of engagement—it’s developing that relationship that doesn’t just tie to the workout, that doesn’t just tie to the nutrition plan that you gave them, that doesn’t just tie to the WOD of the day or programming, right? It’s about developing a genuine relationship and getting to know that person on a different level.
Mike Warkentin (20:38):
You said something really profound that I’m going to repeat. Measure the thing that your client cares about. Again, you’ll hear this in our blog all the time. I did not do this. I thought people just want to do the same workouts I was doing, and I hadn’t come to my gym. I didn’t measure what they cared about. I measured like deadlifts and Fran times and other things like that, which wasn’t a bad thing, but it wasn’t the stuff that they cared about because some of them, many of them, cared about weight loss or cared about looking a certain way or cared about something other than the stats that I was measuring. If you measure what your clients care about and then show them the progress along a scale, you were a three, now you’re a 10 or whatever it was, you’ve lost five pounds, you’ve lost eight pounds, you’ve improved your deadlift, whatever they care about, you show them that metric, you’re going to retain more members because the progress is obvious to you, but it’s not always obvious to your clients.
Mike Warkentin (21:24):
And it’s certainly not obvious if you are not measuring the thing that they care about. So that’s a huge one to take away from this show: Ask the client what they care about, then measure it and then show them the improvement. If you do that, you will keep more members, and you’ll sell more. I want to ask you this one, you talked a little bit how—you said Two-Brain mentorship change your life. Talk to me a little bit about what that means. What specific stuff have you done that really moved things forward? And you talked about COVID and the whole thing after that. What have we got on the table here that really made your business better and made you see huge ROI in mentorship?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (21:56):
I can almost sum it up in one word, and that word is accountability, right? Nick and I—when Two-Brain first presented to me my options for coaches, they said that based on the things that you put in, here are three people who we think would be a good fit. Nick happens to live in the same town that I used to live in before I moved to San Diego. One, Nick is a military veteran, so am I. Two, Nick owns two gyms already. Three. So, he’s been through what I’ve already been through in so many different ways, and I feel responsible to him to accomplish the things that we plan together because more often than not, we are the leaders in our own spaces, right? So, we don’t have necessarily an accountability partner like we are to our clients, right? For our clients, we’re the ones going, “Hey, you missed a meeting. Hey, you missed a session. Hey, what’s this? What are these numbers? What’s this? What’s that?” And so on. And that’s what having a Two-Brain member did for me the most was provided me that accountability. Someone else that I had to respond to, someone else who I had to be able to show up for, right? And it was for my own benefit, just like we do for our clients.
Mike Warkentin (23:12):
And it’s needed. I’ll give you an example. Did you sign up for any of the Summit workouts in Chicago?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (23:18):
I did not.
Mike Warkentin (23:19):
But that’s OK because we checked—but I was standing there, and we were checking the sign-ins at 5 a.m. and every time people sign in, and then they don’t show up at 5 a.m., and they show up at 6 a.m., and on Sunday, it’s worse because people are hungover. And it was funny because we were talking about this: As gym owners, we all complain about clients who don’t show up for workouts when they’re traveling, or they don’t do their workouts when they’re traveling, or they sign in for a class and don’t show up, and then we had a group of gym owners, and many of them did the same thing. And again, it doesn’t matter because they had a great time in Chicago at the Summit. So, I’m not making fun of them.
Mike Warkentin (23:51):
But the idea is that that accountability, every coach needs a coach. And if someone had said, “Hey, if I called that person at 4:45 in the hotel and said, ‘Hey, I know you’re hungover, but we’re downstairs waiting on you,’ that person would’ve run down the stairs and worked out.” But we didn’t do that obviously because we had 1,000 gym owners. But you get the idea. So that accountability is a big one, and we saw proof of that. I’m going to close this one out. You’ve given a ton of info already. I’m going to ask you for something specific. So, if you go back to a period when your ARM was much lower, you weren’t on the leaderboard, way lower, what’s something that you would do to increase it by just $5 or $10? And I want to give this to the listeners so that they can take this and take a small step today. What do you got?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (24:29):
Introduce something to your clients that you already practice, and you already trust, right? And it could be something simple. It could be something that doesn’t necessarily cost a lot, right? It could be just a piece of advice. It could be signing up for a newsletter. It could be, “Hey, we’re adding this one little thing.” So, for me, one of the things that I did was I purchased a fridge, and I filled it, I stocked it, with coconut water and a couple different types of energy drinks that I personally am into, right? So, if there’s something that at the beginning of the workout, my client sees me taking a sip and they’re like, “Hey, what’s that?” “It’s this.” Awesome. Buy that drink. You are already buying it for yourself. For example, buy a case, right? Costs only a couple bucks, but you can pick your number that makes sense, throw it in the fridge, and say, “Hey, grab this.”
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (25:14):
And before you know it, that $5 is $10. That $10 is $20. Because they’re doing one every single time that they come in. Now that’s one that comes with a little bit of cost. What I think even if you were to just say, “Hey, add something intangible,” right? Even if it’s a scale. Say, “Hey, you know what? Something we’re going to start incorporating this month is daily weigh-ins or daily challenges.” And you say, “It’s only this much to sign up for that challenge.” At the end of it, you can reward them with something that doesn’t necessarily have a cost. And it could just be acknowledgement, right? It could be something that’s they, they go to the top of the leaderboard, but in order to sign up for the challenge, it’s five bucks to sign up for the challenge. And the majority of your clients, again, they know you, they trust you, and they’re willing to kind of go a little bit with …
Mike Warkentin (26:01):
It’s a great one. And I’ll tell you a couple of things guys. You don’t have to stock inventory for certain things. Supplement sales work great unless you lose money on them, right? You could work with a supplement provider who just—
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (26:14):
Drop ships.
Mike Warkentin (26:15):
Yeah, drop ships you the stuff. So, someone orders, and it’s like, “There it goes,” right? You get a commission or whatever it is. Don’t lose money on supplements and inventory. You could definitely start selling some extra stuff. And if you don’t sell supplements, they’re going to go to the mall and the kid at the mall is going to give them crappy advice about this thing that they need, which they don’t. And you can get them the things that they want. So that’s an easy one. I’m going to piggyback on what you just said. Another easy one: quarterly or even twice a year, apparel orders with pre-order, sell them a T-shirt. Every one of your clients will buy your T-shirt for 25 bucks or whatever it is. Preorder, so you don’t have to stock inventory because I always lost money on that. Easy win. These are easy small things. Put them on your annual calendar. Do you sell t-shirts, George-Anthony?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (26:54):
I do. They sell really fast, a hit with these hoodies. A lot of people love these hoodies. They see them and they say, “Wow, I need that.” And we even do seasonal colors for example. I just did a seasonal color to where “Hey, these are limited.” Then you’ll say, “We’re only doing these for this month because spring is almost over or summer is coming,” right? And then you can transition throughout the year. If you did a pile drop quarterly to say, “Hey, in the wintertime we’re doing hoodies. In the summertime we’re doing tank tops and hats,” whatever the case might be. People want to support you, right? Your clients want to support you, and they’re willing to spend it.
Mike Warkentin (27:34):
And the key there, do the pre-order. Do the limited quantities, limited time offer. Don’t stock inventory unless you’re really, really good at it. Maybe if you’re in Hawaii or Las Vegas, at a destination, you can do that. But I couldn’t do that. Preorder the stuff, get it out, go onto the next thing. Don’t offer a ton of stuff. Hats, hoodies, done, whatever it is that works. All those little things work. And then the other thing that you said that’s great: Offer something else. Just a small challenge, something like that. Do something else. And what that is is adding value for clients. If clients are getting more, they’re willing to pay more. And that’s an easy one. So, we’ve given them some really big stuff like focusing on your avatar, having high-value services, dropping down to discounted options like group training, and we’ve also given them some very small tactical stuff. George-Anthony this has been a huge success, I think.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (28:20):
Absolutely, and it’s funny you said the kids program. We start our kids program today.
Mike Warkentin (28:25):
Oh.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (28:26):
It’s summertime. We start an eight-week kids program today. Today is the first day of it.
Mike Warkentin (28:31):
Did you have to market that at all, or did you fill it with clients’ kids?
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (28:34):
Clients’ kids, man.
Mike Warkentin (28:35):
Yeah, you just funnel in. So, zero marketing cost.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (28:37):
They already trust us. And the trick is it gets their kids out of the house a bit, right? It’s the summertime right now; the kids aren’t in school. For us, at least, here in San Diego. The kids are on summer break, so the parents are like, “I don’t want these kids in the house. Take them.”
Mike Warkentin (28:54):
And kids programs should be priced higher than adult programs because it’s a specialized service, so you can make way more money on that. Zero marketing costs if you get your clients’ kids. You just have to ask them. And I’ll tell you guys, if it’s too late for you right now, wherever you’re at, to get a kids program in place for summer, put it on your calendar. If you do this right now and say January, February, put a calendar notification that says, “Start planning kids program for 2025,” you will make money in May, June, July, whenever school is out for you guys. There’s another one. George-Anthony, I’m going to let you go. Thank you so much for all this. This has been an awesome show with tactical stuff, my friend. Thank you.
George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway (29:30):
Awesome. Thanks very much for the opportunity.
Mike Warkentin (29:32):
My pleasure. That was George-Anthony Dulal-Whiteway. This show has been packed with stuff that you can use to literally make more money at your gym. If you want to hear more stuff like this, please hit “subscribe” to “Run a Profitable Gym” with my thanks. And now here’s Chris Cooper with a final message.
Chris Cooper (29:46):
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.