Client headcount isn’t everything.
But it’s still important—especially in a gym with great retention and average revenue per member.
When gyms with great metrics across the board acquire more members, the results are spectacular.
With just 150 clients who pay $205 a month, an owner can earn $100,000 a year. You can imagine what happens when a gym earns 200 or more clients who pay $300 a month and stay for years.
I want you to see our Top 10 leaderboard for clients in August 2023, but before you take a peek, remember that the numbers you see below are multipliers of other metrics. If you sell coaching, I don’t want you to have 500 or 600 members who pay $75 a month.
To start, I want you to get 150 clients who pay $205 a month, and then I want you to increase those numbers slowly and steadily while retaining your clients for years, not months. That’s how you build a profitable gym that changes clients’ lives and rewards its owner at the same time.
Behind the Numbers: Tips From Our Top Gym Owners
Our mentors helped the gym owners on our leaderboard do the right things at the right time to grow their businesses. They analyzed metrics, prescribed action and provided accountability.
Here are some of the things the owners in the Top 10 focused on to earn their spots:
“Sixty percent of revenue is PT. Nutrition is launching. … Referrals are huge for us. In a week and a half we are running a bring-your-co-worker day!”
“No paid ads to get to this level. (We do) bring your friend on Fridays. … Group classes for kids have been added.”
“(We have) 80 youth memberships—this is new as of four weeks. Different age group. The youth director leads this program and hires other youth coaches—had as many as 120 kids in there!”
“Added in new things from Two-Brain Business—marketing, using a lot of the strategies, and they are helping.”
“(We run) five youth classes a week. We were really intentional about growing this program. Cancelled 6:30 class because we only had about three to four attendees at that time, so we changed it to the youth class. Parents asked, ‘When are they going to offer it?’ (It was) all organic to fill, but intentional: word of mouth and affinity. … There were multiple questions about youth a week, so we just had to make it happen. Some other members were taking kids to another gym and we didn’t want that.”
“We spend a lot of (time) mentoring our coaches. Members notice that coaching at our facility is top notch. We have junior, senior and master trainers. … The reason we provide this mentorship is to keep trainers and recruit good trainers. The staff is very satisfied, so that carries over to the member experience.”
“Doing the common uncommonly well means that we don’t go fast with all the trends. (We) try to work evidence based as much as possible.”
“(A staff member) calls all members, regardless of attendance, for two to three hours per day to schedule goal reviews. Formerly 65 goal-review appointments—now 165. … (We) added 100—just a phone call. No texting. We’ve been getting more referrals by asking for them at the goal review. Churn has also decreased a lot—normally 20 lost per month, now it was 11. Normally 100 people or 25 percent have poor attendance—now down to only 5 percent not training in any given week.”
“We float some ideas by (clients in goal reviews)—e.g., ‘Describe a bring-a-friend event.’ Then we ask ‘would you ever attend something like that?’ We ask ‘what would be a 10/10 experience in the next three months? What would be your biggest fear of not reaching your goal?'”
“We tell them in the No Sweat Intro and after the on-ramp is complete that ‘we’re going to call you to set up the goal reviews at this cadence,’ so they expect the phone calls. We haven’t had a single upset client on the goal review. Even when they tell us they’re unsatisfied with their results, we say, ‘How lucky we had this conversation to make sure to change your program/prescription/etc.'”
To find out how a mentor can help you add and keep clients, book a call here.
