Today we are joined by Tania Vrga, owner of CrossFit Winnipeg. Tania is an amazing CrossFit owner who strives to help each her clients achieve a healthy and fit lifestyle. Join us today as we dive into a range of topics from purchasing a gym to coaching strategies and more!
Don’t Forget about the 2019 Two Brain Summit, June 8-9 in Chicago! This year we have some amazing topics and guests for both yourself and your coaches. Click here to register and sign up now!
Contact Tania:
http://crossfitwinnipeg.com/
tania@crossfitwinnipeg.com
Timeline:
2:14 – Introduction to Tania Vrga
5:28 – Tania’s experience with purchasing an existing CrossFit gym
8:06 – Finding Two Brain and improving the gym experience
13:44 – How to sell Confidence, Energy, and a better Life to your clients
17:45 – Learning sales and applying it at your gym
20:05 – The training and evaluation process for a sales position at your gym
24:00 – Applying Two Brain paid advertising strategies and their results
32:15 – The key to success and longevity of a CrossFit Gym
Announcer: 00:02 Welcome everyone to TwoBrain Radio. It is our mission at two brain to provide 1 million entrepreneurs the freedom to live the life that they choose. Join us every week as we discover the very best practices to achieve perfect day and move you closer to well.
Chris: 00:26 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 Brumenshankel at Crossfit Port Orange started 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 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 nutrition, accountability plan every month like we do at catalyst.
Chris: 01:33 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 TwoBrain and I am so glad to have them.
Mateo: 02:13 Hello and welcome to the TwoBrain Marketing podcast. I’m your host[Mateo Lopez. I’m one of the digital marketing mentors at TwoBrain business. Thanks for tuning in. This is going to be your weekly dose of Digital Marketing Magic. Every week we’re going to go over some different marketing campaigns, strategies, useful tips, and learn from some of the people who are in TwoBrain and using a lot of the things that we teach and how it’s affected their business. In today’s episode, we have a very special guest, Tania Vrga, Crossfit Winnipeg, and we’re gonna learn more about her super secret, super cool business. It’s not really secret business, but her strategies, the way she’s been able to grow and all that good stuff. So Tania, why don’t you tell us a little bit about you, uh, your business, how long you’ve been open, and let’s start there. Okay,
Tania: 03:00 sounds good. Thanks for having me. So I actually started at my gym, crossfit Winnipeg. We affiliated back in 2008 and opened our doors in 2009 so this is going to be our 10 year anniversary. And for me, I actually quit a job to pursue my passion full time. So it’s, it’s pretty cool to still be here, still doing this after 10 years. And yeah, it all started when I had like some health problems and I managed to kind of get myself out of that Rut and managed to help a couple of other people do it. And then it was like, oh well maybe this should be a real business, maybe this should be a full time gig. So we were actually kind of like the pretty much the first in our city. I actually bought the first crossfit gym and, and then moved it into a much bigger space and, and we’re still here after 10 years.
Tania: 03:56 So it’s evolved quite a bit. But I still love that whole like grassroots, crossfit thing. And you always kind of go back to your roots and what you really enjoy doing.
Mateo: 04:05 Right. So how did you start? What, who were your first clients?
Tania: 04:08 My first clients where I actually, so when I purchased the gym from the person who owned it at the time, I purchased a client list of 30 people. So those were our first 30 clients and about, I think it was like $10,000 worth of equipment, like a few rowers, a couple of balls and a couple of barbells. And, uh, so they were mostly people that I already knew and that I was actually training with at the time. But then once we moved into the bigger space, you know, we, because we were kind of early in the game, we were kind of the destination crossfit gym because we were the only crossfit gym in the city at the time. So, and that’s where that I think has changed quite a bit. Like I would say for the first, right up until maybe 2013, 14, we never did any kind of effort to market and really because we were the destination. So, yeah.
Mateo: 05:00 Yeah. I remember the first time I looked at the CrossFits in New York City and there were really only three or four in the city. Um, there weren’t even 20 in Brooklyn and it was the same thing where we basically just say we’re opening founding member rate and everything was sold out and this was right around 2014 so same thing, peak of peak of crossfit hype. We didn’t have to do much except put the word out. Um,
Tania: 05:24 I think you build it and they will come and they did.
Mateo: 05:28 Things have definitely changed. And so do you have any advice for someone? So it sounds like you purchased a, an existing gym, existing affiliate. Do you have any advice for people who are thinking about doing the same thing?
Tania: 05:38 Um, I’m very happy with how that turned out. I don’t know that the situation is the same now. So because opening a CrossFit gym– the barrier to entry is so low, I don’t know that it’s necessarily, I think you’d have to be very, very careful in kind of with your business plan and all of that. If you’re going to purchase an existing gym, I think you would really want to have, not just equipment and client list in place, but you’d probably want to have all the processes and all of that in place. I think if I did it, if I had to do it today, you know what, I don’t think I would buy an existing affiliate today. I think I’d build it from the ground up is what I would do.
Mateo: 06:15 Yeah, it’s interesting. I think unless you have less, the business is really running smoothly or you’re getting a great deal on like a lease and equipment.
Mateo: 06:24 You’re right. The startup costs are so low. I mean I’ve, I started one of my business partners for like $40,000 and you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a very profitable business, but anything more than that, if you’re going to buy an existing gym, it’s like, well, I could just start my own. Um, but that’s not only that,
Tania: 06:42 but then also it’s creating a situation where it becomes that much harder to keep your staff and all of that because it’s so low barrier entry for them as well. Right. So yeah, I think I would do it. I would do differently now. But at the time, I think it was actually perfect in 2009 there was very few people, 2008 2009 very few people in the crossfit industry actually talking about things that Coop was talking about like processes and systems and profitability of the business. And when I came into it I was like, that’s it. Like I’m quitting my day job, like a very well paying day job to do this. So I’m going to build this like for real, like a real business, not a, what I kind of call, and there’s nothing wrong with this, but like the club house gym or like the, so I knew that I had a very, very different vision of what I wanted it to be from the get go. And I felt very alone at the time. It’s really not until I found to bring that, I was like, oh, okay. Just like other people actually wanting to build real businesses, not just houses around around this thing, this awesome community that we have. Right,
Mateo: 07:47 right. It’s the difference between setting up some, a machine that can work for you versus yeah. Almost like, uh, uh, finding a way for your hobby to pay, pay you a salary. Right, exactly. Or a passion to pay you a salary, which yeah, depending on your goals and your life dreams, that’s definitely fine. But, so tell me a little bit more about that. How did you find TwoBrain and, and what was the state of the business? Why did you decide to listen to Coop and, and what, what happened there?
Tania: 08:15 So I had been following, what was it called? Don’tbuyads.com or whatever that blog was. I, I actually, I found, I found an old hard drive computer from like whatever, eight, nine, 10 years ago. And I had saved some of his posts from don’t buy ads. And I couldn’t believe when I look back at that. But that was still there. And that I had saved some of those posts. So, um, that was my initiation I guess, to, TwoBrain before it was even TwoBrain. From a business perspective, things went really, really well. Like our business really, really grew. We were kind of one of those few gyms that we were lucky enough to have like a 10,000 square foot facility and right around the peak of crossfit really having like 350 members, full time members just coming on a regular basis in a pure crossfit program.
Tania: 09:05 We didn’t really have any other offerings at the time. And then I saw things change. So I saw the business change, we started having more offerings, things like bootcamps, Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, Kettle Bell, Yoga, uh, all of these kinds of things. And then that’s when we realized, okay, well there might be a little bit of a need to kind of bring them all of our systems together and then also market for these programs because crossfit, we never really had to market really. But when you start a new program, if you start like a bootcamp or a barbell club or something like that, you realize very quickly that it’s not quite the same to try to get new people through the door. And, uh, what changed for me and when I decided to join to bring was actually after I had my son, I had taken almost a year off, like close to a year off.
Tania: 09:56 I had traveled, I went to Europe and as my son grew and we made a decision that my husband was going to be the stay at home dad. And it was like, okay, well this business is like, this business is putting food on the table, so let’s do it. Right. And I have tried a couple of other mentors, didn’t really have to get the results that I wanted. So I joined to bring in 2017. And uh, for me it’s been just like a really awesome, just a lifestyle thing. Like he’s just having other people who are in a similar mindset and really wanting to build a business.
Mateo: 10:27 Was the decision to add all these different services and then, and then how did TwoBrain help you not reign it in but really I guess allow you to keep everything organized and keep your business running and profitable because you now have to support your whole family.
Tania: 10:44 Right? Because things were changing so much and I, this is, this has been the biggest challenge for me as a business owner over the last 10 years. Is this a constant feeling that you have to kind of tweak those systems and tweak the messaging and tweak the branding just a little bit. And I am very processing systems oriented and data oriented and what was very frustrating was this idea that like I would as an as a business owner, I would like work, work, work really hard. And once I figure out this process, I’m going to have this perfect process and I’m going to be able to press a button and everything will run itself, which to some degree you can do, you can automate and organize all of your processes and in that way. But the realization then became that there’s never going to be like this moment where it’s like perfect.
Tania: 11:33 Like as soon as, as things are running really, really smoothly, we’re going to realize that our clientele, maybe we want something different or something new and then we’re going to have to Redo this entire process again of tweaking and rebuilding and all of that. And so, so what TwoBrain has done has kind of helped me almost have like a, a meta-system, a meta process. So not, I was already very, very process oriented to begin with. Now it’s like it’s taking it a step further and having processes for my processes and processes for building processes. So I don’t know that I’d find that anywhere else other than TwoBrain.
Mateo: 12:07 Yeah, I think Coop calls it like putting your hand in the machine constantly, just fitting in. Um, and I think that’s, that’s been helpful for my businesses too is exactly, we were saying words put a, meta process, a structure around the rest of what you do and having mentors to guide you and keep you on track, I think is helping.
Tania: 12:27 Yeah. And the other, I know this is going to sound really silly too, but like a lot of the times when I am having like a call with a mentor, even if I just pick up the phone and message someone in the group, it’s like am I going crazy or, and most of the time it’s like, no, you’re actually, you’re not going crazy. Like just this sense of like sometimes thinking that you’re alone or thinking that you’re unique and your problems and then once you actually realize that, okay, everyone else is kind of experiencing those same problems for some reason, that’s a huge load off. Even if it doesn’t actually change, you know, level of stress or responsibility. There’s just something really nice about knowing that you’ve got other people who kind of know how you feel.
Mateo: 13:08 Yeah. As with CrossFitwith having that community and that support, you know, it’s, it’s the same thing and someone to kind of like bounce ideas off of. Every once in a while I’ll, oh, this is this great new idea. We’re going to do all of this. And I might think, oh well maybe what if it’s just me? I’m the only one who thinks this is a good idea. But then if you have the group to bounce the idea off of, most of the time you’re like, oh, there’s a few other people who think this might also be a good idea. definitely. And so you are, uh, uh, you’ve been around a lot longer than most gyms, which is amazing. But, and you, you are a bigger operation. You have other services. And so in your words, what is Your Business? What do you sell and how do you sell it?
Tania: 13:51 We saw the opportunity or our members and the people in our community to gain confidence and just feel better, be better, look better, be more confident to do the things they want to do in their life. Um, and that’s kind of the messaging on that has kind of changed a little bit over the years because you know, in the early crossfit days it was about, it was about friend, it was about, and how that put the realization. And now that kind of, I’ve had my finger a little bit more on the marketing and the sales side of things. And the more you know, more members you talk to and the more potential members that you talk to, the more you realize that the vast majority of the people who come are coming to see us. Just want to feel better and look better, have some more confidence, more energy, more competence.
Mateo: 14:41 I think that’s, that’s so true. Just the more, especially if you’re first starting out, the more you’ll have an idea of what you want to sell. And a lot of times you’ll, you’ll see, well, what are the most problems that your prospective clients are looking at you to solve? Right? What are they asking you to solve? And that can definitely, if you’re listening right, you can shift your messaging around and, and be more effective in, in solving problems and in selling people what they actually need. And you know, that’s what the prescriptive model is all about. All right, so how do you, how do you sell this thing? How do we sell confidence and energy? Yeah.
Tania: 15:16 I think the sales process is really important. I think I am a huge fan of reverse engineering, so if we know who our client is and we know that we’re selling them confidence and energy and a better life, then from there what’s the offering that we have to, what are the outcomes that we need to give them? What does that look like logistically in terms of them being in the gym and the amount of time that they’re spending with our staff members. Once we have that all set up, then I take an additional step back and we look at, okay, well what does the sales process have to look like for that to happen? And then once we’ve got that kind of dialed in, then I go back and look at, okay, if we’re good with our sales process, how do we get people to come in for that sales process? So I’m really a fan of kind of like reverse engineering, that whole thing. And I think he can’t really skip steps. Like, you can’t, can’t market if you don’t have a sales process and you can’t sell if you don’t have anything proven to sell.
Mateo: 16:11 Right. If you don’t have a proof of concept, if you don’t have a program or a system or a product that works, a service that works, you’re not going to make the sale. Exactly. And if you can’t make a sale is no reason to market.
Tania: 16:22 Exactly. Um, so, so I think it’s important to kind of have all of those pieces in place. Um, and the way that we do it is we do the no sweat intro. Um, and we’re actually, we’re toying right now with a longer personal training, an assessment and a, so we’re still kind of tweaking that sales process around that. And that would be much bigger ticket items. Like we’re talking three times a week, personal training for like a year, like a hundred sessions, like $8,000 to $10,000 packages. So we know that the sales process for that is going to be slightly different than a really kind of low pressure. Uh, no sweat intro. Not that the goal isn’t just to help in both cases. Um, but yeah, we’re testing some of that stuff out. Um, but traditionally, and we’ve just used like a no sweat intro, we use an inbody scan most of the time when people are coming in, they’re going to have a body composition goal anyways.
Tania: 17:18 If they come in with a goal that’s more performance related or a sports specific related, then we might do some kind of movement screening or fitness assessment. And then from there we just basically paint the picture, paint the picture of what life will look like for them once they have that energy and that confidence. And what we’re really working on now is just kind of the close, the like, all right, are you ready for this? Do you want to do this one or do you want to do this one? When do you want to start? So I decided that I was going kind of learn it myself first because then I was like, well, how am I going to train anyone else to do it if I, if I don’t know how to do, how to do it? I also think a really, really big piece of sales is confidence. So that’s why I really wanted to do, I did a whole bunch of last year, like a whole bunch of intros cause at least I felt confident that for me to say, okay well it’s going to cost you $700 to do your first month here. Like I have to be confident in the fact that I’m going to give them that much value.
Mateo: 18:17 Conviction is so key. I think too in succeeding in sales, like you have to, you have to believe that your product is going to, or you’re servicing the solve this person’s problem more than, you know, essentially that their belief in their excuses to not do something or to not take action or to think this probably won’t work. Just like everything else hasn’t worked to solve my problem. And yeah, exactly what you’re saying. If you have proof of concept, no, Hey I’ve put like some x amount of people through this 12 week, eight week, year long, a hundred day program, whatever it is. And I know it works if that comes off right. And that’s how you get people to, to know, like, and trust what you’re saying and to want to say yes, I’ll follow you.
Tania: 18:58 Yeah. So that’s actually exactly how I started it. I was like, okay, well I’m going to experience this. Then I actually had some of my staff do a, we did like some personality testing and uh, I found out that another staff member that I had was just really good at sales and relating to people. So I put him in charge of that.
Mateo: 19:16 Tell us a little bit more about that. What, what tests did you run?
Tania: 19:19 Uh, we did, uh, we did a couple, we did Colby, we did a Myers Briggs and this was super interesting because when we did Myers Briggs, I turned out to be like whatever the architect or whatever and which is like I n I n t j or whatever it was. Anyways, when we tested him, he was the exact opposite of me in every single category, which is like the, uh, the entertainer or whatever, which is perfect for a sales position. And yeah, he’s just, he’s just really great with people. Like, not intimidating and confidence in his ability. So he kind of took that over and then he also helped us training our GM who turned out to be like an awesome salesperson as well, which was not what we hired her for, but she’s great. So why not? Right.
Mateo: 20:05 What’s your training process for, for people that you want to put in a sales position and you know, what’s your evaluation process too, if they’re, if they’re doing a good job?
Tania: 20:15 Well, we’re still working on it. Sales is kind of, you know, like fairly new for us because we haven’t really had to sell until like the last couple of years. So we’re still working on it, but it’s a lot of, uh, um, roleplay, um, a lot of kind of, uh, looking over scripts to figure out how to handle objections. A lot of it is kind of when we’re role playing, we’re kind of like imagining that it’s like our aunt or our mom’s friend or something who’s coming in. Um, and really kind of trying to reacting exact same way that you would react to someone who’s just asking for your advice. Um, so a lot of that and right now because we’re bringing in a kind of more involved sales process for personal training, that was completely different situation. I actually hired someone who had a ton of experience, eight years of experience in a Globo gym selling personal training. That’s amazing. Yes. So he is bringing way more to the table. In fact, I thought of having him come on and talk to you guys about this because he’s been fantastic. He’s been with us for two weeks and has sold, I think I want to say somewhere between 18 and $19,000 worth of personal training this week. So
Mateo: 21:30 Talk a little bit about that because how did you find them? Cause I know I myself and I’ve people have talked to you, we’ll, we’ll look if there’s a problem like, hey, I want to be better at this skill, but I know I need to talk to a specialist. I have trouble sometimes finding the person or even reaching out. How’d you find this person? And you know, what’d you say to have them agree to like, yeah, I’ll, I’ll teach you how to sell expensive personal training packages.
Tania: 21:53 It was kind of serendipitous. I did not plan it out that way. So I had been looking for someone in the sales department. My brother works in finance and he’s a really great sales guy. So I was thinking of maybe having him come in and, and work with my staff on that. But what happened was I actually thought, you know what, we need to do more personal training, hire personal trainers. I put out an ad for a personal trainer. He answered the ad and when I looked at the resume, I could see that he wasn’t just a trainer, that he was, uh, uh, sales and personal training manager. And I saw where he worked and it’s like one of the really big global gym chains in Canada, like the biggest one. And so I took him out for coffee and basically just grilled him on all of their internal processes. And when we just started talking, I basically found out that he was basically itching to be able to give good training but not inside a Globo gym. So basically his goal was to try to reproduce or maybe make an even better system than what they had at the global gym, but with what he calls good facilities and good trainers,
Mateo: 23:02 I mean, yeah, it’s say what you want about the results in terms of health and fitness. That bigger box chains can provide the average consumer biases aside, their sales processes are dialed in. And I think that’s something that we’ve done a lot of too, is if we want to learn something new, we’ll just, we’ll just pretend to be, and I think that’s something if you’re listening, you can do is if you want to be better at sales, go and be a prospective client at some of these other gyms. Just walk into a, you know, a, a planet fitness or uh, you know, equinox and, and just say, Hey, I’m interested in a membership and just be honest on your, you know, functional fitness person and you’re looking for something new. And, and see what they, where they take you see how they do actually
Tania: 23:46 actually what we’ve been doing for the last two, three weeks. Then we’ve been kind of going to all these Globo gyms and basically figuring out their processes just by like pretending to be a client. Yeah.
Mateo: 23:57 That’s awesome. So, okay, great. So shifting gears a little bit, you’re working on, you know, sales is a big part of a lot of the training you’re doing with your staff. And as we said before, before you want to market, you gotta make sure your products, your service is great, your sales system is dialed in. Tell us a little about your experience in trying to get new clients and then how that changed or how your business change in applying some of the paid advertising strategies. We talk about it at, at TwoBrain Marketing Episode 3: Tania Vrga.
Tania: 24:28 So it used to be that, uh, like I said, we were destination everyone, anyone who wanted to do crossfit would just come to us. So that was easy. The next step after that was for several years we ran, you know, free trial classes on Saturday afternoons or whatever. We looked at the data that wasn’t, it was okay. Uh, it worked really well for a couple of years.
Mateo: 24:47 I think though, it’s like, yeah, I think, I think a lot of on the TwoBrain side of things I’ve realized free trial classes and things like that are, are not as effective. But why do you think they are, they weren’t as effective or weren’t yielding the results that you are?
Tania: 25:00 Well, let’s think about it. What are people who are actually coming in to see you really wanting and what is their main, what’s holding them back? Right. Most of the time they’re just wanting, uh, to take that first step. That’s the hardest, hardest part. And I think by doing like a free trial class, you making that first step way harder than it needs to be. You know, I don’t, it’s almost like asking, I dunno, like asking someone to like marry you on the first date or whatever. Like can we just like have coffee first? Like, and talk about your goals before I make you do Fran. So I think so that, so that’s the first piece is that it’s a lot easier to ask someone to do a small thing than it is to us someone to do a big thing because once they do the small thing, it’s a little easier to ask them to do the next small thing.
Tania: 25:50 Nope. Um, so I think that’s one piece and I think the other pieces, yeah, across the can be intimidating. Like let’s face it. Um, and how do you know that that free class is going to be the class that they need? It’s like going back to like if that person was my mom’s aunt who was coming in, is that what I would really want her to do if my grandma or my aunt was coming in? Like what? I just have her try a free class. No, I’d sit down with her and figure out what she needs.
Mateo: 26:16 The experience also is, I don’t think representative of what your service will be like for that client for the rest of their time there after they sign up, if they sign up. Agreed. You know, the most of their experience, at least I don’t think. And the way my service is designed isn’t going to be a a room full of strangers who are all trying this thing out at the same time completely not knowing what they’re doing. You know, that’s not what my service is about and I don’t think what yours is either.
Tania: 26:44 Right. So it doesn’t give a good a good idea of what the service is for sure. That’s, and then the other piece too is you also then creating another situation where even after they do the trial class, then you’ve got to try and sell them again. Exactly. You have to sell him twice. Yeah. So there’s a lot of issues I think with the free trial class, but that’s what we were doing before and it worked okay. And then we had experimented a little bit with um, like a Facebook ad here and there and for like a boot camp a few years back, doing like a, taking a video of the bootcamp and then like having a button to a landing page or something like that. But things really changed when I started the TwoBrain marketing. I, first of all, I uh, I related really well to how you guys like kind of teach it – instruct it.
Tania: 27:31 Like I, I do really well if I have a bird’s eye view of what’s happening and what all the moving pieces have to be. And then I’m like, oh well once I figure this out I can do whatever I want with this. I can tweak this and I can change that and I can try this. So I think that’s where the value was is like just learning the tools that I needed. And it was really nice that it was kind of all laid out for me. Like if you wanted to run it this way, this would be, uh, you know, your simple step by step process for doing that. Once we started doing that, I just needed to make sure that I had the availability of salespeople to basically come in and do the intros and make sure that I had the staff. And then, yeah, that was super fun because then I can like start playing around with the numbers.
Tania: 28:18 I could start doing some calculations to see what kind of return on my investment I was getting. And it was a no brainer. Like we’re talking after a couple months, I did some calculations. We’re looking at about 14 times, so like 1400% like return on my investment.
Mateo: 28:38 Wow. So yeah, on average w what are you spending on some of the paid ad campaigns that you have run and what kind of returns where you seeing on?
Tania: 28:48 I’m still kind of like a little trigger shy cause I kinda feel like I could like really, really dial it up if I, uh, if I knew that I had my enough salespeople for it. But, uh, so I’ve been spending anywhere from $10 a day to 30 or $40 a day essentially on paid ads. Um, we were doing like a standard six week transformation that worked really well, very easy to sell.
Tania: 29:14 And now we just kind of started changing our wording when people come in to kind of manage the expectations that this is just the beginning, but the six weeks is just the beginning. So, yeah. So we’re spending a lot on that. And I would say we had all our numbers out of all the people, all the leads that were coming in, we were getting more than half of them actually coming in for their intros. And then more than half of them, uh, would buy afterwards. So if you run the numbers, it’s definitely worth it. Especially if you’re selling like six or $700, six week packages. Right?
Mateo: 29:44 So like on a, on a given month, if you’re spending, I don’t know, 800-1000 on ads, how much, how much front end sales are you generating?
Tania: 29:52 So if I’m spending, let’s say, so I, that’s exactly how I calculated this a 14x return on my investment. So what I did is I calculated over the course of, cause there’s a little bit of a delay in the way that we do the payments and all of that. So I was calculating the return on the investment and let’s say I spent $1,000 in March, in April, I’m going to be seeing anywhere from 10 to $15,000 worth of revenue coming in from that. That was in dollars.
Mateo: 30:20 Wow.
Mateo: 30:21 And that’s not counting if people, you know, what’s the, what’s your LEG on, on most of, uh, most of your memberships
Tania: 30:28 over a year. Um, and, but just kind of weird, like the holidays were a little bit weird with the six weeks. It was very, very cyclical. Like you’ll get like a month where 80 or 90% stay after the six weeks and then you’ll get a month where you get like 20 and I’ll be like, come on. I wonder what happened to that group. Is that the Christmas group or what?
Mateo: 30:48 Yeah, and I, and there’s also a few different ways to, to do it too that you can change the experience. It depends a few, someone one on one or more group for sure.
Tania: 30:59 Yeah. So we have like kind of tiered offerings right now for our different like tiers of classes. And then once, it was interesting because once we kind of felt like, okay, we had an idea of how the marketing could work. Um, we had, uh, we had a really successful campaign for our 55 plus class and it took, it took a two months, but we filled it up. We went from having like four p four regulars in that class, about 16 regulars in that class. And the interesting piece is that we kind of just use the template. What we did is we said, okay, well we’re just going to do like a six week 55 plus campaign and they all stayed afterwards. So, uh, so it’s very easy to just kind of tweak things a little bit and it still works.
Mateo: 31:42 Yeah. That was my, my goal with creating the course material was so that you know exactly what you said, you now have the tools to take this system, this way of advertising and apply it to whatever you want to dream up. As long as the services is a consistently excellent and as long as you have salespeople, you know you can apply it to your 55 plus program or if you have a kids program, you know, whatever it is, uh, the principles still work. And so you’ve been around for 10 years. What do you think has been the key to your success and in your longevity as a business?
Tania: 32:20 Okay.
Mateo: 32:20 Oh Wow. That is such a good question. Well I know a lot of people want to say want to see the same thing. So you know, what would you say, what are you, what would you say to that? That person that, that gym owner,
Tania: 32:32 I think a big key is being okay with change cause it’s really hard to have in this business if you’re not willing to adapt over time and not have that create any kind of self worth or self esteem issues for you to be okay with. Like, yeah maybe that wasn’t the best way of doing things and maybe it’s okay to change. I think that’s one piece. And then I think the other pieces is knowing, knowing who your audience is, knowing who your c clients are, and seriously being okay with not catering to people who are not a good fit for your business.
Mateo: 33:08 What do you mean by that?
Tania: 33:10 I mean, um, I’ll give you an example. So, and our, in our city, uh, there’s probably in about a dozen crossfit gyms and each one of them has a different vibe and some of them have a much more or less a competitive vibes. Some of them have older versus younger crowds. And so over the last few years I’ve had to let clients go who just didn’t like that we were going more around the health and longevity side of things. They just, they wanted to compete and I have to just be okay with saying, you know what, I think maybe this other gym down the street would be a better fit for you. You know, they uh, they really focused on the competition side and that’s okay. You know, I think clients will, members will respect integrity and authenticity when it comes to that. And if you try to be everything for everyone, that won’t always come off as authentic
Tania: 34:02 as what’s being and you’re being a good coach. You know, it’s like, hey, for what you want and your goals, you need specialized coaching or you need to add this to your, to your regimen and this is the best place to find that over here or over there or with this thing.
Tania: 34:19 And often times those clients ended up coming back a year or two or three and they respected the fact that you gave them the best advice that you could have given them at that time.
Mateo: 34:29 Exactly. Cause I know that you’re, you’re the coach, you’re in their corner and exactly what you said, you’re giving them the prescription, the advice, the training that they, they need pointing them in that direction. Awesome. So if people want to chat with you and learn more or maybe drop in, where can they find you?
Tania: 34:47 We are at www.crossfitwinnepeg.com and if every year in Winnipeg do not come during the winter, but now it would be pretty safe. The snow is starting to melt or all good. And if anyone ever wants to drop me a line in TwoBrain or whatever, I’m in the, I’m in the members group. Um, and we also have our Facebook page. My email is tania@crossfitwinnepeg.com.
Mateo: 35:10 Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on today and I don’t know what I’m going to be in Winnipeg, but I guess we’ll see what the summit, yeah. Yeah. There you go. See in seeing a couple of months,
Chris: 35:21 hey everyone, Chris Cooper here on really thrilled to see you this year in June in Chicago at the 2019 two brain summit. Every year we have two separate speaking tracks is one for you, the business owner, and there’s one for coaches that will help them make better, longer, more meaningful careers under the umbrella of your business. This year we’ve got some pretty amazing topics like the client success manager, how to change your life organizational culture or the business owner’s life cycle. How to have breaks, how to have vacations, how to help your marriage survive. Owning a business and motivation and leadership. How to convert more clients, how to create a GM position that runs your gym for you and leaves you free to grow your business. How to start a business owner’s group in your community in more point here is to do the right thing that will help gym owners create better businesses that will last them for the long term, get them to tinker phase, help them be more successful, create meaningful careers that their coaches and give their clients a meaningful path to longterm health. We only do one big seminar every year and that’s the two brain summit and the reason that we do that is because a big part of the benefit is getting the two brain community together and and welcoming strangers into our midst and showing them how amazing GM ownership really can be. We’ll have a link to the two brains summit including a full list of all speakers and topics on both the owners and the coaches side in the show notes. I really hope to see you there.
Greg: 36:50 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 light 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.
Speaker 7: 37:15 You guys later.
