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Permission Marketing

September 7, 2019 Gym Marketing
Email marketing works. Spam doesn’t. Good emails are part of a conversation. Good emails include things your readers care about (I call mine “love letters”). Good emails actually help your audience. Bad emails are sales pitches. Bad emails includes lots of “!!!” and “?!?!”. Bad emails are noise. Bad emails are spam. But the real difference between a great email and spam? Permission.   “I’m Listening” When people give you permission to email them, they’re not necessarily giving you money. They’re giving you something far more valuable: their attention. We spend almost $20,000 every month building amazing tools. We build them so people in our audience will know they can trust us to be valuable and relevant. Here’s a list of tools we’ve published recently, and here’s the result of all that work: 7,500 people open our emails every. single. day. Because we’re not spamming them. Because we earned their permission to send them a love letter.   No One Likes Spam Now, I get spammed a lot. I own a gym. That gym is on a list of CrossFit affiliates. That list gets scraped by hackers and sold to marketers who don’t care about permission. Then those marketers spam my gym. Here’s one from last night: Title: “New Member” Body: “Hey Catalyst Fitness, I know cold emails are about as much fun as doing burpees… .” That’s spam. I didn’t ask for help with whatever they’re selling. I also still have my chris@crossfit.com email account. That account gets spammed daily. Here are two from yesterday: “Chris, does your gym qualify for our free habits course?” (Spoiler: it doesn’t.) “Ready to teach Pilates?” (I’m not.) I built a $7 million company on the back of great content. We publish every day. We don’t spam anyone.   How to Use Email to Build Trust With Your Audience 1. Know what they actually care about. I write about gym owners because I ...
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Two-Brain Radio: Your Duty to Succeed With Jeff Jucha

September 5, 2019 Gym Operations Podcast
Greg: 00:00 – It’s Greg Strauch of Two-Brain Media and on this week’s episode we’re hearing from Jeff Jucha. Now, this was originally recorded in the Two-Brain Summit of 2019 and he talks about the topic of your duty to succeed. He touches on things of how to affect the world that you want around you and the option of failure. As always, subscribe to Two-Brain Radio to hear the very best ideas, tips, and topics to move you and your business closer to wealth. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Two-Brain business. We make gyms profitable. We’re going to bring you the very best tips, tactics, interviews in the business world each week. To find out how we can help you create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com. Greg: 00:48 – We’d like to thank one of our amazing partners, Driven Nutrition. Have you ever been asked by your members or your staff what supplements to take, when to take them and where you should get them? How about the time it takes to put in the orders and making sure you have the right amount of supplements on hand? What about your profit margins on your supplements? Do you know what they are? Are they good, even? Your time is worth something, and ordering supplements isn’t worth your time. Driven Nutrition has solved this for you. They allow you to step aside and use preorders to send to your members for all supplement orders. That way you don’t have to have extra inventory on hand and it allows your members to order the supplements when needed. They’ve created an amazing on-boarding process for new businesses to allow for quick and easy understanding of what they have to offer and true profit margins that most other supplement companies promise but never deliver. This is why I personally use Driven Nutrition within my ...
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How to Say Goodbye (For Now)

September 5, 2019 Member Retention
“It’s not you; it’s me.” Cancellations in your gym are hard to take. When you build a career around caring for 150 clients, you form tight emotional bonds. As Greg Glassman wrote in 2006: “You’ll find me at my clients’ parties, weddings and family gatherings. Indeed, I am a personal friend to nearly every one of my clients.” As much as we try to stay objective, it still hurts when a client says goodbye. Here’s how to respond to that “Dear John” letter saying “I want to cancel my membership.”   1. Express Your Concern With Specific Details “Oh Sally, I’m sorry to hear that—especially right after your recent weight loss! We’re just getting momentum!” And leave it at that. Don’t include a “but I understand” or easy way out of the conversation.   2. Remind Them What They’re Losing The fear of losing something you have is far greater than the promise of getting something good. That’s why you see all those “don’t miss out!” deals on Facebook: You don’t want to have things taken away from you. For example: When you cancel your membership, you’ll lose access to our: – 1:1 coaches – Nutrition accountability program – Goal-setting meetings – Workout-tracking app – Private members’ Facebook group And so on. Fill out your own list, starting with the most valuable part of your service. Surprisingly, I’ve had clients say, “Oh, I’ll be back in a month and don’t want to lose my data on SugarWOD. Just keep the membership going.” There’s far more value to your program than the classes you teach. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much. So remind them.   3. Make It Easy for Them to Come Back Asking the question “when do you think you’ll be back?” can help the client create a clear picture in his or her mind. If you can book a goal-setting appointment with the person in the future, ...
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Three scraps of manilla paper clipped to a clothesline read "good," "better" and "best."

The Best Time To Improve Your Gym? IT'S NOW.

September 4, 2019 Selling Gym Memberships
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 ...
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Two-Brain Radio: Adrian Bozman

September 4, 2019 Personal Development Podcast
Sean: 00:00 – Hi everybody and welcome to another edition of Two-Brain Radio with Sean Woodland. Today I talk with one of the OGs of CrossFit, Adrian Bozman. First, as an entrepreneur, it can be hard to know where to start. That’s where “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” by Chris Cooper comes in. As reader and gym owner Shawn Rider says, quote, “If you are thinking about starting a business, just started a business or have had a business open for a while, this book is a must-read to show you the path to the successful life.” End quote. “Founder, Farmer, Tinker Thief” is on Amazon now. Adrian Bozman is one of the few people in the world of CrossFit who is best known by his nickname, Boz. He has been around the sport and the training methodology for nearly 15 years. Boz has been a member of the L1 seminar staff and currently serves as one of the head judges at the CrossFit Games. We talk about how he initially got involved with CrossFit, what it’s like dealing with some of the more interesting questions he fields from athletes during competition and some of his memorable moments from his time on the L1 staff. Thanks for listening everyone. Boz, thanks for doing this man. How you been? Boz: 01:18 – I’ve been pretty OK, Sean. Thank you for having me. I’m really touched that you would think of me. Sean: 01:22 – Well, it’s my pleasure. I know you got some great stories to tell and you’re one of these guys that I think people who regardless of when they got involved in CrossFit, you’ve always been there. How did you find CrossFit? Boz: 01:34 – Well I was lucky enough to be living in the Bay Area in the early 2000s. And I was working as a personal trainer at the time and this is like 2004 probably. And ...
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The Best Time to Open a Gym? It's NOW.

September 3, 2019 Selling Gym Memberships
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 ...
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