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How the wrong marketing can actually hurt what matters: your retention rate.   “Customer satisfaction is useless. Customer loyalty is priceless.” Jeffrey Gitomer   Plot twist: my parents own a tea house.   They sell carbs galore. Delicious carbs, for cheap. They host a lot of private events: birthday parties for old people, retirements, and sometimes wakes.     Because the guest of honor is usually old and tired (or dead and awkward), many of their invitations say “come and go” on them. They mean, “Have a short visit, but don’t stay forever.” So people wander in, have a drink or a tea, stop at the bathroom, and get home before Matlock. They don’t expect to stay for long.   Obviously, we don’t want new CrossFitters to stay only for a few weeks, and then leave. We don’t want them to have an exit strategy. Even when we advertise a six-week challenge, which has a clear endpoint, we try to convince them to stay at the end.   Here’s the problem: when you flood your gym with new people, you dilute the attention given to your current guests.   Greg and I both started as Personal Trainers. We worked with one client at a time. Then, eventually, we added a second client in the same slot. Now our attention was split, but the net benefit to each client was still positive, because they had some support and friendly competition.   When we added a third client, the support and competition became more anonymous, but some clients liked it even better. So the group model evolved.   But if you’re selling group fitness, and the group continues to swell, you’ll soon reach a point where each individual member of the group receives diminishing levels of 1:1 coaching. That makes coaching a one-way conversation (more like group choreography than coaching, really). The client doesn’t have a clear relationship with you or the coaches, ...

On my first day as a CrossFit gym, I had zero clients. No one walked through the door. Ditto the second day. On the third day, a father and son signed up for personal training (my 1:1 business was 3 years old) and open gym access. I remember printing their client cards. Since I opened my affiliate in 2008, thousands of people would come through the doors of Catalyst. Most who came in to “try CrossFit” are gone–my weekend OnRamps, my “try a free class” or “stay for a week free” clients. But many of the clients who came in through a consultative process are still here, even ten years later. In fact, if I walk through a list of clients who have been with Catalyst for more than 5 years (there are more than 40 of them), I see that all but TWO started with a no-sweat intro and 1:1 training. And those two are the parents of a client who started with an NSI. But what of the others? Where did they go; and why? Will they be back? Think about the last time you tried something new. For adults, this happens very rarely–maybe one or two new activities per year, according to behavioral scientists. You formed your opinion on the activity right away, and then did one of two things: 1. disliked the activity, and never went back. You checked it off your list, said “been there, done that” and moved on to something different. Or, 2. you liked the activity and told everyone you knew about it. We’re extreme social creatures. We want to tell others our experiences, positive or negative, because adding value to our group makes us more socially safe. Yesterday I wrote about cultural synchronicity. I shot a quick video for TwoBrain members explaining which activities will reinforce your culture, and which will fragment your culture. In the video, I said that “We ...

“Jane is a great client, but she’s never really been part of the community. I don’t think she’s ever come to a single event outside the gym.”   I hear that complaint all the time. Here’s why Jane doesn’t care about your pub night…and why it doesn’t matter.   The “culture” of your gym can aid retention. It can help pull people closer and feel like a family.   It can also drive people away. It can divide people, create “cliques” and tell some people they don’t belong here.   How do you create the culture that binds people together? By reinforcing the story people tell themselves about your gym family. By leveraging the internal phrase: “People like us do stuff like this.”   This is called cultural synchronicity: when people belong to your gym because the base of their self-identity is in your tribe. They’re more closely aligned with your group than with any one thing your group does.   Want to test your cultural synchronicity? If your gym family stopped doing CrossFit and started doing something slightly different–like obstacle course race training–for three months, how many of your members would stay? The people who would stick around are more closely aligned with your culture than with any one activity (CrossFit). You want more people like that. Here’s how to get them, pull them close, and keep them.   First, consider this graph of your clients’ behavior: Obviously, every client you have does CrossFit or other HIIT. They have that in common, and the pursuit of CrossFit reinforces their place in your Culture.   But what ELSE do they have in common? That’s what you should pursue next.   In some gyms, the whole membership goes out for drinks on Friday–except, maybe, the 10% who don’t. What do you do for THOSE 10%?   Maybe you’re happy to leave them. If so, carry on. If only 10% of your ...