“More clients” are not a solution to a problem.
In the best gyms, they are icing on the cake.
Here’s what I mean:
Many struggling gym owners say things like this: “If I could just get 10 or 20 more clients, everything would be OK.”
Except those 15 new clients enter a rickety business in which the owner is a great coach but the other staff members are about a C+. Or the clients aren’t onboarded properly and feel lost. Or no one contacts them to see if they’re happy. Or they stop coming and no one notices.
So the new clients leave, or they stay but 15 existing clients pull the plug instead.
And the owner says this: “Maybe if I get another 10 clients, things will improve.”
The cycle continues as the owner burns through the market by adding and quickly losing clients—clients who don’t develop fitness habits and improve their lives.
The reality is that you cannot fix a broken engine by pushing it harder. It just doesn’t work like that.
I just finished clearing about 6 feet of snow up in Canada after wild December dumps, and I can tell you with certainty that machines must be in tip-top shape if you plan to run them hard. And if they break, you have to fix them before you can get back to work. You can’t just push harder and hope “that rattling sound goes away.”
It’s the same in a gym.
The very best gym owners work hard to be profitable with smaller numbers of clients—150 is a great first target—and then scale up from a position of strength.
Build a Solid Machine
Our Top 10 gyms have client counts that range from 363 to 741. Check it out—and note the international flavor of this month’s leaderboard:
These numbers are uncommon, and I’m proud of the clients who posted them.
Most gyms reach a far lower number of clients—often 80 or 100 or 150—and hover around that number forever. They might add a few or lose a few, but they never reach that next level and keep growing.
That’s because something is broken—maybe it’s onboarding, maybe it’s service delivery, maybe it’s retention. Some part of the business is lacking, and it’s causing a never-ending member bleed. The owners then fall into the trap of trying to plug the hole with more members, but it never works.
The best gyms don’t operate like that. With the help of a mentor, they create an airtight, spreadsheet-backed plan to be profitable with 150 members, and then they build systems to support that plan.
That means they set up four funnels to acquire leads (referrals, content, social media, paid ads), they build great offers and improve sales skills using the Prescriptive Model, they map out client journeys, they improve service delivery and create coach ascension models, and they focus on retention—they really, really focus on retention.
In other words, they build well-oiled machines that are capable of handling “more.” And these machines often require only a little oversight from the owner, who can then choose to build more machines or just take their kids to the beach.
A gym that’s running at an A level with 150 clients won’t break if the owner decides to add 50 more—or 300 more, as some of our leaders did.
But a gym that’s puttering along at a D level will implode if a lot of clients are added. More clients increase the stress on your business systems, so they’d better be solid when you scale up.
My advice: Don’t chase a random client count or “more.” Build your systems and get to 150 members. Then go further if you want to—or consider staying there but delivering more value to 150 clients (a mentor can help you decide what’s best for the business).
Pushing more clients into a sketchy machine won’t fix it.
Build a solid machine, then add clients. That’s the correct order.
