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Yesterday, I wrote that the best time to start a gym is NOW. But what if you already own a gym? What if you’ve made mistakes–with your pricing, with your location, with discounts…? The best time to fix them is now. NOW is the best time to grow your gym. Here’s why:   1. Mistakes Are Less Fatal Now Five years ago, one or two mistakes could have killed you. Now we have antidotes. If you priced your service too low in 2012, you were probably dead. You’d fall into the trap of more members paying less money. You would work crazy hours yourself. You’d coach new clients every single week because of a high churn rate. Then you’d stop getting new clients, and that would be it. Now, if you’ve made a horrible mistakes with pricing, we know the way back. We’ve done it hundreds of times with gym owners around the world. We can walk you through the process step by step, and support you all the way. Discounts? PIFs? Lifetime memberships? All poison, but now all treatable, thanks to experience and data. We’ve got the cure for the mumps, and now we’re working to vaccinate fitness entrepreneurs to avoid these problems.   2. The Marketing Problem Has Been Solved The top question fitness entrepreneurs asked in the 1970s was still the top question they asked 40 years later: “How do I get more clients?” Now, we’ve solved that problem. We teach the step-by-step process in the Incubator. It goes like this: Fix your retention problems first Sell a valuable service, at the right price, really well Help your current people more Help the people closest to them by getting referrals (in an un-slimy way) Help the people surrounding your best clients by knowing their problems and solving them Find the people who need you on digital platforms, and market to them effectively Track every step along the ...

There’s never been a better time to open a fitness business. Here’s why: 1. Low Barrier to Entry It’s no longer expensive to launch a fitness business. When I started as a coach in 1996, it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to open a gym. You had to buy Hammer Strength equipment; you had to have a big budget just for mirrors; you had to have at least half a dozen treadmills. When I opened Catalyst in 2005, I had $16,000 on a partner’s line of credit. I spent every cent. I bought machines that I rarely used, because they “looked professional.”All of the real equipment cost less than $3000 combined. The market has pivoted. Newcomers to fitness now accept that they can get results in a warehouse with a barbell and a set of monkey bars. People expect to sweat now. CrossFit has been a driving force behind this sea change. The low barrier to opening a CrossFit affiliate has meant nearly 30,000 first-time entrepreneurs have done so. And other studio businesses—for pilates, yoga, bootcamp, barre, personal training—all benefit from this movement toward the small-scale, personal coach. You can open in your garage after work now. Even a decade ago, this was much harder. 2. Working Business Models Make It Easier to Stay Open It’s really, really easy to open a fitness business. But until right now—today—it’s been really hard to keep a fitness business going. The wild and free fitness market meant that any first-time entrepreneur could go off solo and just start a business. But that meant that most small gyms were owned by first-time entrepreneurs, prone to novice mistakes (I was one!) We were all isolated little islands of trial and error. Some of us survived through luck, and a few survived by finding a mentor. I had both. Now it’s my mission to keep fitness businesses going for the long-term, because microgyms have more ...

Software companies haven't always focused on showcasing client results in the gym. We hope this review will help change that. To start the process, we evaluated seven platforms in detail: CrossFit btwb, Exercise.com, SugarWOD, Trainerize, TrainHeroic, TrueCoach and Wodify.