Blog

Transform your gym
in 5 minutes a day.

Get the no-BS morning newsletter read by 30,000 gym owners.

How To Write a 6-Email Conversion Script

I get cold leads all the time. I get them from Facebook ads. I get them from Instagram. I even get them from Amazon.   Only a small fraction of those cold leads ever jump straight to a purchase. Most need to know MORE: they need to know that I care about their problems and have a reasonable chance of solving them.   The job of your website is to get people off Facebook, and encourage them to sign up for your email list (or a face-to-face meeting.) No one browses websites anymore. So you write content to attract people to your site, and then you get them to continue the conversation through email.   The email conversation should explain the benefits of your service, and “warm them up” to book a consultation with you. The emails can easily be set up to run automatically without fancy software – just a MailChimp account is more than enough, and some billing platforms actually allow you to build in email automations. We show you how in our mentoring program.   At our gym, if we get 10 cold leads from a Facebook ad and two sign up for a No-Sweat Intro right away, we can reliably convert three more from our email sequences. Here’s a short video on how to build an email automation in MailChimp, set up a form on your site, and trigger the emails to send on your schedule:   (Can’t see the video? Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/HH0UChxwI2M)   Scroll lower on this post, and you’ll find the DIY guide to writing a six-email starter sequence (we give our actual text and several other sequences to clients in the Growth Stage of our mentoring program.)   Overall look and feel: personal, not like a newsletter. Avoid logos or footers. Use first-person, intimate language. It should look like a real email. Use merge tags to insert the person’s real name in the ...
Read More →

Episode 116: Iron + Mortar

 
Read More →

Sticking It To The Man

One of the longest words in the English language is “Antidisestablishmentarianism.” It was coined to create a name for 17th-century members of the Anglican Church who wanted to remain the official church of England.   Their motto could have been, “Don’t change just for the sake of change.”   CrossFit rose to prominence as a protest against the fitness industry. Greg’s “Fitness in 100 Words” could have been nailed to the doors of Gold’s Gym like Martin Luther nailed his “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” to the door of a church. Early gyms put their spotlight firmly on counterculture: brick walls, skulls and crossbones, ripped palms on Instagram, “we don’t need to make money at this.”   But as CrossFit grew, it started to become The Establishment.   In 2011–early days for many of us–SealFit published, “Is CrossFit Just Not Cutting It For You Anymore?” This signaled the exit of the Early Adopters, who were moving to even more extreme training plans. The banner image to the article was a group of soldiers–presumably SEALs–doing overhead squats, an exercise they’d never have considered before CrossFit.   The article quoted Mark Twight’s semi-famous line, “There’s a fine line between salvation and drinking poison in the jungle.”   Twight had just left CrossFit after a dispute over the intellectual property contained in the L1 handbook. He was separating himself from the CrossFit brand. But that didn’t mean he stopped doing burpees and cleans. And the “semi-famous line” was famous because CrossFitters made it so.   In 2018, there’s a trend, amid CrossFitters, to be “un-CrossFit” or “CrossFit, combined with X” or “The next evolution of CrossFit.” Several companies seek to profit from the CrossFit name–and our hard work, affiliates–by advertising themselves as “better than CrossFit.” If you want to know who’s profiting from our brand without adding anything in return, simply ask them to define their service in one sentence ...
Read More →

Episode 115: Jeremy Kinnick

 
Read More →

Let's Start at 500.

I used to keep a picture of myself over my desk. In the picture, I’m deadlifting 500lbs at the Wolverine Open, an APF meet.   After one client meeting, I took the picture down and put it in my drawer. I haven’t looked at it since. Here’s how it went:   Client: Is that YOU in that picture? Me: Yes. Last year. Client: How much WEIGHT is that?!? Me: five-oh-five. Client: Can you teach me how to deadlift five hundred pounds? Me: Probably. What can you deadlift now? Client: As a guess, I’d say three hundo. (Yeah, people said “hundo” back then.) Me: Okay, well, I think a good short-term goal is to get to 315lbs–that’s a big milestone for a lot of lifters. It’s three plates a side, and… Client: Nah, I don’t want to lift 315. I want to lift five hundred. Me: Well, you have to go up in small increments. It’s not really a trick you learn. You have to build up– Client: If you can really teach 500 pounds, why can’t you just show me that?!   This is a true story, except for the deadlift part. I really did pull over 500 in several meets. But no client would ever think, “Let’s just start at 500 pounds.”   In the REAL story, a new client calls me for their free call and asks,   “Can you teach me how to reach more people with my Facebook ads?”   Me: Sure. Who are your best clients right now? Client: Married parents who earn over $100,00 per year and don’t want to waste their time in a Globo-gym. Me: Great. Let’s start with your email list. Let’s upload a list of all emails from people who have ever come in and not signed up, or signed up for awhile and then quit because– Client: Nah, I don’t care about my current clients. I only want NEW ...
Read More →

The Marketing Gap

You hate selling.   Selling feels unnatural to you. It’s painful. You can’t “close”. You underprice your service. You find excuses to give discounts to everyone. You don’t trust yourself.   So you outsource your “marketing” to someone else. You give them free reign: “Put up a bunch of Facebook ads, get as many leads as you can through the door, and I’ll pay you anything you want.”   What many gym owners are buying is the ability to abdicate responsibility for generating revenue. They don’t want to learn Facebook ads, and they definitely don’t want to feel like a salesperson. That’s certainly understandable. But almost all of them are missing the easier way to get new clients that FIT. They’re skipping steps 1-6 and jumping straight to Step 7.   What happens when a newcomer walks in your door and says, “I’d like to start with learning to snatch.”?   You start with the air squat, right? And then, maybe, the deadlift. Not only will these keep the client safe and healthy, but it will make the client’s snatch MUCH better long-term.   Here are the steps you’re missing. They’re easy; they never cost more than a cup of coffee; and they work.   First, start by identifying your BEST clients. You don’t want just everyone. If you spend a lot of energy on a transient client, you’ll have to keep expending the same energy on the next transient client. We have an exercise for this in the Incubator.   Then call those clients in for a goal review. Ask how they’re doing, and if they’re perfectly satisfied with their progress. (We teach this in the Incubator too.)   If they’re doing well, ask who has helped them most on their journey. Invite that person in to meet you for a conversation–not a free trial.   Then think about the people who surround that client: who do they golf ...
Read More →